Extract of the series " 1900 Paris "

Whether it is people from last century shan't ding in front of skyscrapers in Dubai, or just a man dreaming simply about a woman, these three series, each with their own characteristics, complete each other, giving the audience an unique traveling experience in time, letting them reminisce life in the past and project life in the future. As a result of using the black and white theme as a medium, past and the future have little difference between them in his work, in contrary, they fusion into one and another through a bridge of eternal time.

Pierre Alivon, the artist, puts women in the predominant position in his work. Making tests and experiments, as if he is trying to provoke a hot debate of whether these heroines would survive after traveling time and space, and whether our mind would allow such exchange of eternal beauty. Wit, unique, humane, full of color and imagination, his works, through past and the present, through the present and the future, invite us to reconsider the world of art.
A first series named « 1900 Paris » is composed of 100 photographs that invite us to enter into old time. These images not only embody a union of time periods and a union of angles and perspective and light, but they are also a kind of union of photographers. With exquisite detail, Pierre Alivon has blended the street photos of a Parisian photographer working in the early 1900s with Alivon’s own images of present day cities. You see women in their grand Edwardian hats walking, for example, through a Times Square presided over by a billboard of JR Ewing in cowboy hat. You see a woman waiting a a street corner in an elegant flowery chapeau, a wall of tattered San Francisco paper ads tacked to the wall behind her. Pierre Alivon has stitched together two eras, just over a hundred years apart, making a photographic time loop. The resulting work is poignant, transformative and disorientating reminding that we ourselves only temporarily occupy these streets.