Still life photographer Maxime Guyon zooms in on the toothbrush

Photographer Maxime Guyon impressed us last November with a portfolio dripping with slick, technologically-themed still life photography. Traversing the world of car engineering with an apparently expert eye, Maxime has now turned his attention to an object we can all relate to: the humble toothbrush.

In a 72-page publication by Shanghai-based publisher Same Paper, designed by Jinkui Zhou and accompanied by texts by Joël Vacheron, in Toothbrushes, Foam Talent 2016 winner Maxime gets up close and personal with the tiny machines which signify the open and close of our everyday. Up close, the formations of the brushes’ colour-packed bristles take on new meaning, highlighting the many and varied designs of the humble object.

“Despite their very basic functions, toothbrushes typify a highly diversified, and often cryptic, universe,” Same Paper argues. “Design, terminology and features embedded in these everyday objects remind some recent technological developments. This applies in particular to optical fibres whose products sound almost supernatural. Starting from this observation, the goal was to show how extrapolations are pivotal in the creation of a collective imagination. Thus, the principle adopted was to select and apply the enigmatic products descriptions made by optical fibres manufacturers to the toothbrushes photographed by Maxime Guyon. This lexical substitution brings together two regimes of contemporary commodities that belong to radically different regimes but, in many aspects, share the same languages.”