Guillaume Janot: The backbone of this book is a collection of images produced during a travelling project that I carried out throughout Europe with a Villa Medicis Hors-les-Murs grant. It is a continuation of my work, in the sense that it is about circulating between different cultural codes, and has nothing to do with landscapes or the geography of Europe.

François Piron: It's not a dérive throughout Europe, then, but rather a focalisation on some specific places, and among them, on places extremely emblematic but for which, paradoxically, there are no real image representations. For instance, no single image of Berchtesgaden, Hitler's Eagle Nest, has really stood out in the collective imaginary. Nor is this the case of the square in Munich where Hitler held his first speeches. But sometimes, you also photograph places which we have a very fixed representation, like for instance the cover image of this book that gives us a very different perspective of the Abbey Road crosswalk. We only know this place from one image—that of the Beatles album— and this fact undermines its reality as a place. So, on the one hand, you concentrate on places of which we have no image, and on the other hand, places that we know so well thanks to some images that they almost disappear as places.

GJ: My intention was not to make up for a lack of representation, because in the case of Berchtesgaden, as in the one of Abbey Road, it comes from a default approach to places. In Berchtesgaden, I shot a whole series of images just by circling around Hitler's summer house, without it being visible, and using a particular process that makes the image extremely appealing, picturesque, very serene, almost postcard-like.
We all know the cover of the Beatles album, or the archive pictures of Hitler and Eva Braun standing on the terrace of this house. In both cases, what I produce is more like a side image.

FP: If it's not about photographing landscapes, what do you consider these spaces then? Are they like figures? Do you see them as signs from cultural history? It's undisputable that they are iconic places, and that they are part of a landscape, which is first of all a cultural one.

GJ: Yes, the icon is presupposed, and I'm not checking anything or going back there in order to compare different representations. For me, it's about reactivating icons in order to displace them. The series that was done in Belfast and that introduces this book consisted of a quite head-on approach to the conflict between the Catholics and the Protestants, and everything we already know about it. The borders between the different neighbourhoods, the signs of affiliation that are visible inside these territories... The colours of the British and Irish flags are painted on various components that constitute the urban space, in order to distinguish which neighbourhood is catholic and which is protestant. By using black and white, with its whole palette of greys, it becomes impossible to define these territories precisely. So the series shows a territory that is overcoded, over signified yet neutralized completely.

FP: Is it a way of saying, in this particular case, “I'm not here to inform you”?

GJ: Yes, and it that case it's precisely the opposite. I want to appropriate these territories as signs, and to go on a journey inside the image, to stroll in the codes of the image, rather than to report once more on something we already know.

FP: In this sense, it is a continuation of the work you've done until now. And of this ambivalence between the idea of producing an image as a subjective production, and at the same time the conscience of the image as a social fact, as something already there, and already seen.

GJ: Often we hear that everything has already been photographed, that photography has participated in this whole idea of postmodernism, where it became impossible to propose new forms and where only some sort of recycling is allowed, to say it a very broad and synthesizing way. Let's take for instance the picture of the cow, which is a direct reference to the cover of the Pink Floyd album Atom Heart Mother. It's clear to me that with photography, it's impossible to plagiarise or to do a “remake” of an existing picture. It's never very far from this, but still it leads to the production of a new picture. In our collective images, there are things that are with us, things that we can recognise very easily, which are coming back again and again, like sunsets for example. But it's never plagiarism, because, even if you get as close as possible to a referent image, still, you'll end producing a new image. Photography is quite fascinating in this sense.