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Surreal Photographs Imagine Buildings as Only Their Facades


In his ongoing series Facades, photographer Zacharie Gaudrillot-Roy imagines what buildings would look with just their face. These surreal, digitally manipulated images dissect the front doors, windows, and balconies from the rest of their structure and show homes and businesses as having brick-thin widths. You'd think that the sheer disparity in weight and proportions would make them topple over, but aside from this glaring difference, everything else about the photos remains normal. It gives the work a very eerie feeling.

Gaudrillot-Roy posits what's behind the walls of cities, small towns, apartment complexes, and farm houses. We see nothing but unoccupied open space, which makes them feel a little lonely. But, that's partially the point of the photographer's series. He likens it to wandering through a foreign city, where our first impression comes from the buildings that face the streets. “What will happen if we stick to that first vision? If the daily life of ‘The Other' was only a scenery?” He writes, continuing, “This series thus offers a vision of an unknown world that would only be a picture, without intimate space, with looks as the only refuge.”








Zacharie Gaudrillot-Roy website
via [Colossal and designboom]

Sara Barnes

Sara Barnes is a Staff Editor at My Modern Met, Manager of My Modern Met Store, and co-host of the My Modern Met Top Artist Podcast. As an illustrator and writer living in Seattle, she chronicles illustration, embroidery, and beyond through her blog Brown Paper Bag and Instagram @brwnpaperbag. She wrote a book about embroidery artist Sarah K. Benning titled "Embroidered Life" that was published by Chronicle Books in 2019. Sara is a graduate of the Maryland Institute College of Art. She earned her BFA in Illustration in 2008 and MFA in Illustration Practice in 2013.
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