French photographer Romain Jacquet-Laggrèze He moved to Hong Kong in 2009, inspired by a quick pace and verticality. Now it documents a densely populated city wealthy in life, abundance of detail and visual contrast.
Initially, the architecture itself drew Romain Jacquet-Laggrèze’s EyeThe culmination in his series This shows a clean scale scale. However, he quickly found inspiration in residents, hundreds of lives and a city vigorous and at all times in motion.
“I like making visually rich scenes the most, with a lot of details and one living thing that stands out on them, like a tree, a man or a bird. I usually walk around a district that I love, and when I find a building or city landscape, I’m waiting to see if something can bring life to this scene,” he says.
“Photographing people and birds in the city, for me the most satisfying aspect is to capture the positions that only last a split second, but transmits the whole life and mood of the stage. Because these moments can not be easily controlled, it seems that this is something magical when we capture such an authentic scene. I think it brings poetry.”
With his attention to grasping the moments of life in town, his style deviates from tight portraits, and more towards the environmental portrait, which shows a small topic in an ideal composition, as if a part of town itself. His favorite area of Hong Kong, which still enlivens his love for photography, is Kowloon. He discovers that older areas are filled with color, vitality and patina of time.
This patina is shown in his photos, cacophony of colours, each builds a contrasting color, years of layers of paint cracked and peeling windows and washing spent on drying, evidence of life inside.
His sense of flawless time, Jacquet-Laggrèze, reflects gestures and moments that provide insight into life in a city hailed because the fourth most densely populated on the earth. Particularly striking are his paintings of construction staff, the inconspicuous stars of his current project, which use bamboo scaffolding for scaling buildings, many stories sitting on bamboo inches in lethal exploits.
“In my latest series, the biggest challenge was to find men building a bamboo scaffolding, because they work every day in different places. Small scaffolding they build sometimes only requires working hours, so I have to be there at the right time and the right place. It requires a lot of walking, patience and observation. And actually even these three are not enough.”
“Before this series I often walked with headphones in my ears to help me focus on what I see. But to notice these men, my eyes were not enough, because the amount of details that constantly surround you when walking is simply too intense. I have longed for a man on the facade many times.
The spark for his serial projects begins with visiting the city, allowing the natural discovery of what is happening. He never comes out with a specific idea, forcing a plan, but instead allows a simple walk around the city to reveal another visual narrative.
This intuitive approach is suitable for creative compositions using its style, while finding a balance in documenting the stage. Although he takes under consideration the rules, similar to the third principle when photographing, Jacquet-Laggrèze prefers to capture his images deliberately wider, allowing him to make compositional decisions on the big computer screen, and never hurry up in the mean time through the camera’s viewer or LCD.
“The great improvement of digital cameras over the past a long time has actually been a vital factor that enables me to create all my work. I shoot with Sony A7R IV and various first lenses, similar to 55 mm, 90 mm, 135 mm and 300 mm. I really like these lenses because Freedom in my photographs in my sense to find differentiation in various best composition.
His recently accomplished work, He was captured in such a way, documenting spontaneous moments in town, allowing the compositions to breathe in order that she could refine and shrink the impressions of viewers when growing. This is a trilogy emphasizing the weather of natural life viewed from town streets that encourage him essentially the most: trees, staff and lots of birds.
Jacquet-Laggrèze said: “I am particularly proud of my latest work, I started by shooting wildly growing trees on residential buildings in the middle of the city. Looking up to find trees, I noticed men building the scaffolding. And looking for men, I discovered a variety of birds living at the city height. I focused.
It will be presented at the upcoming exhibition on May 10-25 by The Blue Lotus Gallery in Hong Kong. It coincides that he coincides with French May Arts FestivalOne of the biggest cultural events in Asia, which takes place annually by the Culturelle France – Hongkong was limited to promoting French art and culture.
This combination together with his birthplace, France, never left. Spending sixteen years old, gaining life in Hong Kong, Romain Jacquet-Laggrèze feels able to return to his roots.
“I would like to create a new series of work that does not apply to Hong Kong, because I have already photographed it. I originally come from Paris, where I spent the first 20 years. I hope that in the future I will be able to develop a new series of photos of this city in which I was born. This is my greatest pursuit of the future.”
Romain Jacquet-Laggrèze works may be found His website AND InstagramWith book AND Available printouts in the sector of limited art.
