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New Deserts : A Photographic Chronicle
of a France Closing In on Itself

For over ten years and thousands of kilometres travelled by motorbike, Gilles Prunevielle has been documenting the silent closure of local businesses in rural France. Bakers, grocers, cafés, hairdressers, hardware stores — these abandoned shopfronts bear witness to a gradual and largely unreported commercial desertification. Photographed 90% on film in 6×6 format, these images form a visual and sensitive archive of a disappearing social fabric. Each immortalised façade is an act of resistance against oblivion, a way of fixing in light what supermarkets, economies of scale and shifting consumer habits have condemned. This documentary work stands in the tradition of the great French photographic missions, caught between political commitment and aesthetic inquiry.