In Facades 3, the latest in a series of such sets, French photographer Zacharie Gaudrillot-Roy ones again visits flatland, imagining the world constructed like a stage set from virtually two-dimensional building fronts (or sides).
In architecture schools and firms, students and designer often draw or photograph (or these days: turn to Google maps) to capture the street- or ally-facing parts of buildings adjacent to their site — an exercise to understand the context around their new vision.
In previous iterations of this series, the photographer focused on day-lit scenes, often occupied by people and cluttered with other contextual cues. In this latest set, calm, quiet and lonely evenings along country roads are the focus instead, all the more eerie as subjects.
Gaudrillot-Roy adds a twist to this approach, looking at structures from an angle, but nonetheless imagining them to be two-dimensional. He accomplishes the effect by photographing real places, then nearby landscapes to infill gaps when he subtracts. The surrealistic results call into question what lies beyond shared public space, highlighting the invisible voids concealed by facades.
