While researching my project, I have
returned to familiar photographers and artists as well as discovering new and
innovative projects by practitioners whose work either builds on that made by
previous artists or investigates something more contemporary.
Work which recently caught my interest is
a series called ‘Facades’ by French photographer Zacharie Gaudrillot-Roy. There
are three collections; Facades #1, Facades #2, and Facades #3. To me they
suggest a confidence in technique as well as a pleasure the photographer takes
in building an illusion, which despite knowing it is an illusion, still keeps
the viewer very much in the sphere of reality.
The photographs in Facades are of streets, sometimes in
urban areas, sometimes in more isolated places in the French countryside, photographed
to capture every detail in a careful, considered way, yet some include
passers-by to remind us these places are real and not computer-generated. The
illusion comes from the fact that all the buildings are stripped of their solid
bulk and all that remain are flimsy facades, standing precariously tall,
without even the supporting beams you’d expect from a film set.
Facades #1 utilizes various angles, giving us an objective
viewpoint in places, as though we are there walking along the street. There is
even one photo taken from a high vantage point, with a cityscape in the
background, peeking through the gaps where the remains of the buildings should be,
adding to the vertiginous effect.
Facades #2 almost takes on a journey, through streets where
people walk casually, unaffected by the freestanding facades around them. There
are photographs taken in more rural and isolated areas, and I am reminded of Mel
Brooks’s film ‘Stir Crazy’, where a group of villagers construct a town
entirely from fake fronts of buildings in the middle of the desert as a decoy
to a group of cowboys who terrorise them.
The photographs in Facades #3 are all taken at night, and for
me another type of magic happens. Night is when our senses are more acute, and
familiar places can often seem different, almost as if from another world.
Moonlight, streetlamps (they often render colours very differently) and shadows
can play tricks on us. I find the photographs in Facades #3 the most
convincing. Like William Gedney’s
‘Houses at Night’, I feel that what I am looking at is unusual, but it is
because I am there at an unusual time, and viewing in an unfamiliar atmosphere.
Gaudrillot-Roy’s aim is to highlight the feeling of walking
through a place for the first time, where all the information we have to go by
are the fronts of buildings.
‘The façade is the
first thing we see, it’s the surface of a building. It can be impressive,
superficial or safe.’
‘Just like during a
wandering through a foreign city, I walk through the streets with these questions : what will happen if we stick to that
first vision? If the daily life of “The Other” was only a scenery?’
Most of us have had the experience
of walking around a foreign town or city. Our senses are heightened as we grasp
for something familiar, and our curiosity for what lies beyond the surface may
be sharper. There is also a slight tension, the possibility of becoming lost,
of wandering into unsafe areas, of never finding a way back, or walking into a
trap. Gaudrillot-Roy’s photographs and the technique he uses play on these
tensions and our feelings of vulnerability.
That feeling of discovering all is
not as it seems, that what we see is a fake, can have a powerful psychological
effect, and can often hark back to our childhood and loss of innocence.
Certainly dreams formed by anxiety can shape scenarios where familiarity and
security are turned on their head. The photographs in Facades do have a
dreamlike quality to them, and it is in large part due to the techniques used,
where they are manipulated digitally just enough to make them almost
believable. The photographer has presented us with the right amount of illusion
and inventiveness so that his aim is clear, without drawing attention to the
technique used. Like dreams that tell us something, Facades is a series which
captures just the right amount of reality for the message to be convincing.
Photography is a medium where lines
between reality and fantasy can be very thin, and a technique such as computer
manipulation is only one method of finding a place between the two. Studying
Gaudrillot-Roy’s series of facades is helping me to determine how to present my
work with just the right amount reality and fiction. I am also keen to explore
how to seduce the viewer and make them enjoy the experience of viewing a
different world through my photographs.
1
Hitchcock and Art: Fatal Coincidences by Dominique Paini and Guy Cogeval (Mazzotta Edizione, 2000)
