On the road...Hubert Delisle"

Initiated by the first governor Creole Louis Henry Hubert Delisle who also has many books on the island of Reunion (Tunnel Mountain, the school of arts and crafts or the Natural History Museum. ..), county elevation belt Highway 3 was intended to open up high and allow the transport of sugar cane plantations. Monumental work for the time, the great challenge will be named "Route Hubert Delisle" by imperial decree of Napoleon III on 12 May 1858. The work lasted 30 years ...

    On the slopes of the high western 800 meters above sea level, The "somin gouvernman" runs in 35 km and many ravines Guillaume at Plate, via Ravine Daniel, Three Pools or the Rowboat.
    It marks the boundary between sunken cane monoculture, agro-forestry and animal husbandry upstream. All around, this is the reign of agricultural landscape diversity with market gardening, horticulture and geranium. Coffee has physically changed the landscape with clearings growing up, and economically because of the part of it in exports, which the island became dependent. First flourishing culture then declined under the pressure of international competition and the introduction of the cane. Geranium appears in the high inter-war over 600m, and still represents the symbolic image of the high west.

   Roadside, many small supermarkets, hardware stores and bars are present, evidence of historical attachment, personal or forced the population to the territory. This road around which many families live and possessing its own identity, marks a climatic, physical and even psychological boundary between low and high. It contrasts between them before a certain sweetness of life and the harshness of life, between nature and urbanization, between modernity and tradition, between boredom and activity ... The road works as a board -contact because it brings together a mosaic of snapshots of daily life, the experience of people, objects or landscapes. The photographs will then meet them sometimes frontally, sometimes with more humor and perspective.

Beyond a worn look for that one road, this work is as contemporary portrait of a region that high in the west of Reunion. In a tension between documentary rigor and freedom of art photography, he strives to combine landscape approaches, contextual, humanist or spectacular through a prism, the Hubert Delisle Road.
Emmanuel Blivet. 2014.