Yvon Lambert
"Histoires de Frontières / Border stories"

29 September 2017 – 28 September 2018
Jardin du Bra’haus II, Montée du Château, Clervaux

Yvon Lambert has an interest for borders and what they symbolise. Ten year long has he been traveling throughout border crossings. His impressive black & white photographs bring us deep within the historical context behind the scenes.

"The common factor linking all the locations depicted in these photographic stories is that they were or still are home to border crossings.

This roaming, cultivated by the dialogue between the observer and the photographer, is to be viewed and understood as an attempt to associate borders – government-imposed objects – with individual destinies, with the destinies of those who have crossed these borders, been stopped by them, even died at them, like Walter Benjamin. The words of Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, Georges Perec, Peter Handke and several other writers determined the choice of the locations that I captured through my lens.

The first steps of this project were taken during a time when the gradual dismantling of national borders seemed achievable. The last twenty years, however, have once again given rise to a spectacle of at times bloody conflicts within Europe itself. Which explains why some of the photographs contain traces of these events almost without my intention.

These border locations – rather mundane like any other location – feature landscapes and people, and yet there is something mysterious and woefully relevant about them. Georges Perec called them places of disappearance." (Yvon Lambert)

This photographic series was developed between 1989 and 2009.

Born in 1955 in Luxembourg. Yvon Lambert lives and works in Luxembourg and is represented by the Agence Vu in Paris. Starting as a technical engineer in the iron and steel industry, he then studied photography in Brussels. He realizes some series on orders from foreign ministries and cultural institutions, national and international. He regularly works on the theme of borders in Europe, which counts as an award-winning project at the "Grand Prix of the City of Vevey" in 1995. His photographs are displayed all over the world.