1st place
gold star award
cornut cyrus
france
title
Chongqing, On the four shores of passing time
One of the world’s highest demographic and economic growth rates.
The central urban area of 15 million souls is infused by almost 300 000 newcomers every year.
Chongqing, the “Mountain City,” at the confluence of the Yangtze and Jialang Rivers, struggles to break through the fog that covers it all year long.
Heir to the displaced from the Three Gorges dam and daughter to the Beijing authorities – who upgraded her to a municipality, raising her up to the same heights as her big sisters on the East coast – Chongqing has developed at a dizzying speed. Urban forms and infrastructure have sprung up, gravity-defying, embracing the shorelines of its four banks, each of them steeply carved out by the current of the water. The speed of urbanization has outperformed overtaken the slow rhythm of the fishermen, the erosion of the rivers, the powerful hatching of the mountains.
The uninterrupted dance of the cranes and the excavators stack people ever higher in an unsettling quickness. No obstacle remains to stop the skyscrapers from surging up. They reproduce themselves almost identically, like metastases. The transport networks cross the water, pierce through the rock, and climb the hills, defiant of the power of the elements. The river has become the artery that the makes beat an economic heart that is resolutely turned towards the economic conquest of the West by way of the new silk road.
Only the banks, almost wild, resist, remaining allied with the river and its caprices. People sitting on its embankments watch it meander, watch their sightlines get blocked out and its banks grow thicker. Here and there they still cultivate a few food-producing gardens while they wait fatalistically for the last bits of bare land to disappear.
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entry description
Chongqing municipality, People’s Republic of China, population of 34 million.One of the world’s highest demographic and economic growth rates.
The central urban area of 15 million souls is infused by almost 300 000 newcomers every year.
Chongqing, the “Mountain City,” at the confluence of the Yangtze and Jialang Rivers, struggles to break through the fog that covers it all year long.
Heir to the displaced from the Three Gorges dam and daughter to the Beijing authorities – who upgraded her to a municipality, raising her up to the same heights as her big sisters on the East coast – Chongqing has developed at a dizzying speed. Urban forms and infrastructure have sprung up, gravity-defying, embracing the shorelines of its four banks, each of them steeply carved out by the current of the water. The speed of urbanization has outperformed overtaken the slow rhythm of the fishermen, the erosion of the rivers, the powerful hatching of the mountains.
The uninterrupted dance of the cranes and the excavators stack people ever higher in an unsettling quickness. No obstacle remains to stop the skyscrapers from surging up. They reproduce themselves almost identically, like metastases. The transport networks cross the water, pierce through the rock, and climb the hills, defiant of the power of the elements. The river has become the artery that the makes beat an economic heart that is resolutely turned towards the economic conquest of the West by way of the new silk road.
Only the banks, almost wild, resist, remaining allied with the river and its caprices. People sitting on its embankments watch it meander, watch their sightlines get blocked out and its banks grow thicker. Here and there they still cultivate a few food-producing gardens while they wait fatalistically for the last bits of bare land to disappear.
about the photographer
Cyrus Cornut (France, b.1977) is a photographer and artist with an academic background in architecture. With architecture as his template he came to the world of photography through cities, paving a photographic path within the urban jungle, in search of the « poetry of fatalism in these cities, by always setting the human scale in this eternal urban palimpsest ». He has been working on capturing architectural form through light, and looks into the human hive of activity and social organisation. With a keen interest and sensitivity towards the urban or symbolic problems faced by the places he travels through, he questions the whys and wherefores of all that is built and environmental and social impact, through his photography.back to gallery