This image is part of the ‘Space Project’ series that shows my fascination with space through an archive of the most significant hubs in the world: the Star City in Russia; the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan; the space centres of NASA in Cape Canaveral in the USA and Arianespace in Guiana; the star observatories in the Atacama Desert in Chile, New Mexico or the Nevada and the Mars Desert Research Station for Martian habitat simulation in the red desert of Utah.
I wanted to create emotion by mixing historic reality with my childhood dreams. Thus, these mythical places of space exploration became film sets where Jacques Tati would meet with Jules Verne or Stanley Kubrick. I wanted to play with the ambivalence between fantasy and reality in order to confront the myth of the Space Race with a sense of irony, provoking a fusion between waking and dreaming.
Vincent Fournier is a photographer living in Paris
