Nicolas Faure - Autoland

Scalo, 1999. First edition. Hardback with bellyband.

Condition: Like new, with very good bellyband.

ISBN: 3-908247-11-X

Nicolas Faure's new book investigates the intersections of nature and the modern, industrialized world, of bucolic landscapes and civilization's artificial order. The highway is the perfect emblem for modernity's appetite for speed, power, and efficiency. Faure followed highways across Switzerland looking for the most salient spots where fundamental conflicts underlying high-tech culture suddenly become visible. He invites you to ponder the contrast between calm mountains and the impressive, elegant structure of a highway bridge.

Overpasses, underpasses, bridges, and expressways are transitory zones we don't experience unless we are whizzing by in car. Faure stops where we normally just drive on, speeding past a landscape that dissolves in cinematic bliss. Looking at Faure's photographs you will perceive highways as architectural sculptures as elegant and discreetly functional as they are monumental. As much as they interrupt an idealized natural order they complement it as their shapes and structures are determined by the ground they're built on.

Faure heightens your awareness of the boundaries-a chain-link fence, a deep ditch, a concrete shoulder-that delineate the disparate parts of our civilization. Autoland is a guide to modern landscape and the differences inscribed on it. An invitation to re-examine your ideas on nature, culture, and their boundaries today.
Nicholas Faure's engaging color images of the highways of Switzerland are equally concerned with the social experience of highways and the beauty of their forms.