While I can appreciate manipulated photography, I rarely find a connection to it. Gaudrillot-Roy’s ongoing series is a rare example. His work doesn’t so much capture the eeriness of the mundane, as coaxes it out. There’s always something slightly eerie about quiet streets in the dead of night, a sense of the unreal, and Gaudrillot-Roy makes this manifest by stripping away the buildings and adding new details, while maintaining a superlative command of line, tone and colour. The images are like pages from a children’s fantasy book, and defy any kind of logic, but rather communicate in an emotive, imaginative way.

They might be playful, but there’s also a sense of anxiety, even terror – where have all the people gone to? Am I, the viewer, all alone in this strange world? Has there been a strange apocalypse, or am I seeing the world as it always has been, the world of families and jobs and bars an illusion I’m seeing through for the first time?

A social message could be drawn from this, but I suspect this is of lesser importance to the image than the communication of mood and the injunction to imagine. Certainly, this is the impression one gets from Gaudrillot-Roy’s commentary.

This week’s reflection tasks asks me to position my practice in relationship to this work. I cannot. I have neither the technical skills nor the inclination to adopt such strategies. As a photographer also interested in the eerie, however, it is interesting to see how a photograph can be used as a starting point for further development.

http://www.zachariegaudrillot-roy.com/en/portfolio-20289-0-40-facades-3.html