LUX

LUX
Guillaume Perret

The campsite where Guillaume Perret first ventured in 2022, on the edge of a forest north of Lausanne in Switzerland, looks like just another campsite. However, if you linger on after the tourist season and let winter come, you enter another world: the world of year-round residents living in caravans and camper vans (some of them labelled Bürstner LUX) that erode with the passage of time and the weather, harsh or mild.

On several occasions, the photographer immersed himself in the daily lives of the inhabitants. Seasonal workers, students, pensioners, blue-collar workers, and sometimes company executives live side by side in this secluded place... Social origins and life situations differ. Page after page, the LUX book gives us a glimpse into the intimacy of a community that, whether by choice or not, redefines other ways of living, where consensual frugality, real precariousness and a ‘luxury’ taste for freedom coexist.

With his simple approach, somewhere between ethnography and poetry, the photographer delivers pieces of life in tones as cold as they are warm, revealing souls and bodies sculpted by the elements. Skin becomes liquid, mineral, plant-like, wrinkled sheet metal set in fire and ice. Coupled with the fantasy of certain scenes, the abandon of poses and nudity, the light here seems to contain part of the enigmatic substance that defines humanity.

THe LUX series by Guillaume Perret was awarded with the Swiss Press Photo Award in the category « Daily Life ».

Technical features

You can view or download the press release kit (visuals, book cover, book layout and press release PDF).

« Travailleurs saisonniers, étudiants, retraités ouvriers, on entre dans le quotidien à la fois libre et précaire de ces personnes plus ou moins en marge de la société, à travers des images qui naviguent entre documentaire et imaginaire. »

Julien Bolle, Réponses Photo, novembre 2024