Eerie photographs envisage towns made only of facades
Reduced to just their facades, the otherwise unremarkable buildings in Zacharie Gaudrillot-Roy's photographs take on a surreal new quality.
The eerie, sparsely populated pictures appear to play into the French
photographer's self-professed aim of creating "confusion between fiction
and reality."To get more news about
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Gaudrillot-Roy has spent a decade producing the digitally manipulated
images as part of his ongoing series, "Façades." But while his focus on
frontages can be interpreted as a commentary on architecture, he instead
wants viewers to share his curiosity about what might lie behind.
"My feeling is like (that of being) a spectator," he said in a phone
interview, "as if I was wandering in a city that I could know. But it's
not real, as if I was a stranger."Most of the time, you don't go into
buildings that you don't know, You don't speak to people you don't
know," he added.
Gaudrillot-Roy's creative process begins simply enough: wandering the
streets in search of structures that capture his imagination. Having
photographed the buildings from a variety of angles, he then uses image
manipulation software to erase their volumes and digitally extend the
backdrops behind.
The result is an almost dystopian vision of urban and suburban scenes --
fictional structures reminiscent of Russia's "Potemkin villages," or
fake settlements, that were designed to give the illusion of life and
prosperity. By night, when street lamps bathe the flat facades in
artificial light, Gaudrillot-Roy's structures come to resemble theater
props or an abandoned movie set.I'm really influenced by cinema," he
said, admitting that this connection to film was, at first, a happy
accident. "I was not thinking about (this) at the beginning, but now
that's why I take pictures by night."
Most of the images were taken in the photographer's home city of Lyon,
south eastern France, where he co-founded the photography gallery and
workshop L'Abat-Jour (or "The Lampshade").
Others were shot in Montreal, Canada, or around the Swiss town of Porrentruy, where he recently completed an artist residency.
