These two photographs of used safes found at a scrap merchant’s were taken “on-site,” using a black backdrop to isolate the objects in a makeshift studio. The presentation of the object is perfectly neutral: not frontal, as in many of the earlier series, but seen from the angle of an axonometric perspective. The effect of axonometry is to flatten the object in order to clarify our reading of its geometry, in the manner of a drawing. The object is also treated from the symbolic angle: these are very much safes, objects that are by their very essence inviolable, impenetrable and even, as here, indestructible – witness the dents and scratches made by the mechanical digger, which has disfigured the surface of the object without being able to break it. The primacy given to the form and the graphic quality of the surfaces causes the images to shift towards a kind of spectrality: what is shown is not the object but its envelope.