Fiction and absurdity: Thomas Rousset’s exaggerated explorations of rural life

Rousset did this throughout greater than a decade, leading to an unlimited physique of work which has now been assembled into the photographer’s first solo publication: Prabérians, printed by Loose Joints. The e-book presents intimate portraits and collaborations with the individuals of Prabert, gathered in each nook of his household village. The photographs have interaction with deep rural traditions, concurrently dignified and unconventional, mixing exaggerated eventualities with hanging landscapes and naturalistic portraits.

“While you see my photos, you don’t actually know if it’s now or if it’s 20 years in the past,” Rousset says, referring to the fantastical, hallucinatory nature of his photographs. The inspiration for this stylised method comes, he says, from movie – from the magic-realism of Emir Kusturica’s Black Cat, White Cat and the gothic works of Tim Burton. The latter’s trademark mixture of the child-like and the unnerving can definitely be recognised all through Rousset’s photographs: a confetti-covered lamb stares calmly into the photographer’s lens, a rope knotted round its neck. Two males sit at a desk strewn with apples, considering a rooster that hangs limply from the older of the 2’s hand. In one other picture, two males gaze intently on the wrecked stays of a automobile, because it burns within the midst of a forest.