My family often criticizes that my travel photographs show no trace of me in them because I rarely pose for the camera; instead I prefer to capture what is happening around me. Often my snapshots are a series of architectural inquiries, which I would argue is more me than a portrait! So, when I came across the work of 29 year old Alexandre Jacques, I was excited to recognize in his work, a kindred appreciation of the abstraction of architecture through photography. Of course my excitement was tinged with the jealousy, that I had not taken these photographs.
Alexandre Jacques transforms skyscrapers in New York, Paris, and Brisbane into hypnotizing, 2D, geometric patterns. Jacques, creative director of Architectural Patterns, abstracts the repetitive facades of tall buildings through the use of in-camera cropping, deep focus, and consistent lighting. The cropped image eliminates the buildings' scale, creating a sense of vastness and isolation in which the viewer becomes the subject. While eliminating place and scale, the images actually seem to emphasize the building's style and therefore the time of its design. The result are prints that could be mistaken for goache paintings or computer images but knowing that they are photographs gives them more weight.
Prints are available at Architectural Pattern from 60EUR.