Alphaville

This photo series is shot in Paris suburbs far from glamourous center, nothing is staged but sun never comes up. The series came from a strange undercurrent in the air in Paris these days: there is a pervasive feeling that everything here is more and more controlled, watched and somehow less alive. Sometimes it feels like reality progressed far beyond the future predicted in old dystopian movies. To pay homage to that, the name "Alphaville" is token from Jean-Luc Godard's Noir-film classic Alphaville (1965). Godard’s movie shows an Orwellian world: it is shot in and around the futuristic architecture that dots the city. Nothing from the movie was shot in a studio—everything took place around real buildings. It is a dark and brooding film: the city is portrayed as a machine where everything turns and repeats ceaselessly, everything is computed. The only way the hero found to get away from it, is to go beyond logic and look what makes a human be human, find what cannot be computed : soul, poetry or whatever it can be called. This what this photo series is about : this is not finding beauty in an ugly reality, it’s trying to stay human in this machine.