This new release differs fundamentally from other photo books in the “Lost Places” genre and is anything but a hasty shot of snapshots from derelict buildings. The almost 300-page book comes in an XL format and weighs a lot: more than three kilograms. In the illustrated book, which was produced with a great deal of effort, the photographers’ works are given their due.
Stefan Hefele and Felix Röser chose their camera equipment for the book project “Temps perdu – Journey to France’s forgotten places“which was published by the Frederking & Thaler publishing house, set out on a multi-year expedition to a France unknown to us, to a realm of morbid decay.
The 180 published photos illustrate her search for lost time, “À la recherche du temps perdu”, as the French writer Marcel Proust originally titled it. “Cool, slightly musty-smelling air hits us through an open door,” write the photographers in the afterword to the work, as they both enter a château discovered by satellite photos and covered in ivy. “My mind is flooded with memories of the more than a hundred places we have visited for this book over the past few years. The countless hours of research.”
“The true paradises are the paradises lost” (Marcel Proust)
Hefele and Röser’s visual inventory of forgotten places with their razor-sharp photographs in connection with excellent print quality, supplemented by the texts by France expert Hilke Mauder, make “Temps perdu” the most beautiful Lost Places book of recent years.
Also check out the following Lost Places photo spreads:
– Haunted places: In the middle of downtown Frankfurt, the old police headquarters is falling apart
– Lost Places in Lusatia: The “Blaues Wunder” bucket wheel excavator near Senftenberg
– When a synagogue becomes a fitness center: In search of Jewish life in Eastern Europe
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