Thibaut Derien lives in a Ghost Town
“He is living in the past as well as the present, inspired by the backstreets, the suburban shopping areas, the dying centres of towns.”
Roger Hicks writing in Amateur Photographer UK.
Thousands of stories can be written behind these desolate facades.
Thibaut Derien set out in search of the few remaining small shops, now abandoned, witnesses to a bygone era, a trade, a taste, a fashion. Deserted shops, left to the ravages of time, which he carefully selected from the multitude he encountered, for the unique emotion they evoked, and which inspired this ghost town, helplessly observing the bustle of impersonal shopping malls in the distance. Not so far away. These small shops populate Thibaut Derien's ghost town, forming a cemetery, a collection of traces, vestiges of a bygone era, swept away by industry, franchises, and the indifference of customers bewitched by the sirens of mass consumption and its temples of sheet metal and cinder blocks. In this cemetery of shops, the shutters are down, the doors sealed, the windows bricked up.
