About the place
Les Baux-de-Provence, located in southern France’s Provence region, is a fortified hilltop village known for its medieval castle ruins and surrounding Roman stone structures. Once a strategic site during the Roman and medieval periods, it now exists as both a historic landscape and a visual icon.
Work Summary
After the Image: Re-seeing Les Baux is a photographic project grounded in a collection of historical postcards from the 1950s. It revisits the architectural and environmental features of the Les Baux castle region in southern France, engaging with the construction of visual narratives from a contemporary photographic perspective. The project is composed of two parts: rephotographic alignments that echo the original postcard compositions, and observational images that document the act of looking—capturing gestures, tourists, and interpretive signage. Through a culturally displaced lens, the project seeks to excavate the invisible modes of seeing and spatial memory embedded in this “city of images.”
Context
The project situates itself in relation to the visual territory framed by historical postcards—namely the Roman ruins and landscapes of Les Baux. These images once served as tools of idealization within a broader colonial and touristic visual regime. In the present day, the region has experienced depopulation, with much of the village inhabited primarily by elderly residents, transforming into a performative, museum-like environment. Against this backdrop, the project proposes an alternative, more fluid mode of looking—an embodied and peripheral practice that gently resists the inherited forms of “image-colonialism.”
Qitao Yang is a photographer and visual artist from China, currently based in London. He is pursuing a B.A. (Hons) Photography at the University of the Arts London, College of Communication. His artistic practice centers on photography, video, and the politics of viewing, exploring how images intersect with space, memory, and narrative. Working across still and moving images, his work often takes the form of experimental documentation and visual storytelling.
The project draws inspiration from Berenice Abbott’s Changing New York, while also engaging with methodologies of rephotography and theories concerning visual reconstruction and place-memory. Archival research was conducted through the Bibliothèque nationale de France and local heritage repositories, focusing on the overlapping imperial presences of the Roman Empire and the French state in this terrain.
Process
The work began with a set of vintage postcards acquired in Arles. Using the imagery and inscriptions on their versos, original vantage points were estimated and cross-referenced with contemporary visual sources. Fieldwork was conducted on-site in Les Baux-de-Provence, including photographic documentation, interaction with local residents, and spatial exploration through walking and mapping. In post-production, the images were printed and reorganized multiple times to explore alternative sequencing and reading strategies. The final presentation takes the form of a chapter-based website structure designed to reflect the layered act of re-seeing.