A closer look at Jonk's creative process

Can you tell us a little about yourself and your artistic practice? 

My name is Jonk, I'm 36 and I live in Paris. I'm a photographer of abandoned places.

What is your background and how did you get into design? 

I discovered photography at the age of 11 when my parents sent me on a language trip to the United States, where each of the ten children in the group lived with a different host family. The few souvenir shots I took with the famous orange disposable cameras were my first. For the next six years, every winter I travel to a new family in a different state, and in the meantime upgrade my equipment with an entry-level film camera.

After swapping it for a pocket-sized digital camera, I made my first solo trip at the age of 19. That trip to Barcelona changed my life, and I came back with two passions that have never left me: travel (I've since visited over 70 countries) and urban art (street art and graffiti), the discovery of which gave me my first photographic subject, and which keeps me busy to this day.

Living in Paris, I discovered urban exploration at the end of the 2000s through roofing, subways and unofficial catacombs. I then found a second fascinating subject: documenting the hidden side of the city, and invested in my first SLR camera, an APS-C. Climbing to the rooftops to see the city from above, walking at night in the metro or spending whole days in the catacombs exploring the dozens of kilometers of galleries and chambers carved out of the rock, I find great excitement in this activity, the adrenalin I'm looking for in my life. These urban explorations, and my search for unpublished graffiti photographs, soon lead me to abandoned places, where graffiti artists often go to paint in order to be alone, quiet, and take their time to create bigger and better paintings. After spending some time with these artists, I started painting in these places myself, hence the nickname "Jonk". At this time, I also glued my travel photos on the street.

Travelling, painting, gluing, photographing, wandering on rooftops, in the metro or in the catacombs, a very busy job that leaves me no time to do it all. When the time came to make a choice, I gave up the spray can, the glue pot, the altitude and the underground to stick with the wasteland photo, even though I never gave up my blaze, the symbol of my graffiti period, which was very important to me. I continue to travel, almost exclusively in search of abandoned places, with or without graffiti. I further improved my equipment with one, then two, full-frame SLRs.

Today, I've visited over a thousand and five hundred of them, in some fifty countries on four continents.  

In your day-to-day work as an artist, what inspires you? What triggers the creation of a work? 

When I visit an abandoned place, I sometimes don't take the camera out of my backpack. This is often the case in newly-abandoned places, where the impact of time is not yet visible. That's what attracts me: what I call decay, the markers of time that has passed. 

As time goes by, my interest focuses on what I call time capsules, those places on which only past time has had an impact, without human intervention. I like to have the impression that time has been frozen for years, decades. The most striking example of time that has passed is nature taking over again. This is what strikes me most strongly in this vast subject of abandonment, and therefore the one I've decided to focus on. It's poetic, almost magical, to see nature take back what was once hers, reintegrating through broken windows and cracks the spaces built and then abandoned by man, until they are totally engulfed. 

This theme came naturally to me because of the ecological awareness I've felt since I was very young, and the strength of the fundamental question it raises: that of Man's place on Earth, and his relationship with Nature. At a time when man's impact on his environment has never been greater, it also and above all seeks to raise awareness, without being pessimistic. Nature's reclaiming of abandoned places is clearly what inspires me most. This work is published in two books, Naturalia and Naturalia II, released in March 2018 and April 2021 respectively. Volume III may appear in March 2024, who knows... 😉

If these time capsules linked to Nature are certainly the strongest from a philosophical point of view, it's the Soviet wastelands that are for me the strongest from a pictorial point of view.

What could be stronger than a decrepit theater with a banner reading " Art belongs to the people!" in Cyrillic script above the stage, and " V.I. Lenin" as a signature to the quotation? 

What could be stronger than finding yourself in the headquarters of Soviet forces in East Germany and stumbling across the map of Berlin's strategic attack plan in 1945?

What could be more powerful than standing on the roof of a 16-storey building in Pripyat in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone and seeing a metal structure several metres high depicting a hammer and sickle?

I often travel to the former USSR to photograph its remains. I've been to Chernobyl (the time capsule par excellence) 7 times, where I now take groups.

Can you explain how you go about creating your work? What are the different stages of creation? 

For me, almost all photography is about framing. The adjustment part is incidental and almost automatic/instinctive. So I spend a certain amount of time analyzing the scene. I always try to get the verticals straight, and occasionally the horizontals too. I tend to overuse the wide angle and try to fit as many things as possible into the frame, but I take care of myself!

When the frame is done, "click" then I do everything I can not to get caught! 😉

Follow Jonk's work on his Instagram account.

And to continue, findz his book "Wastelands: l'art en friches"on fluctushop.fr