What lies behind facades? Nothing, at least in French photographer Zacharie Gaudrillot-Roy’s world. His ongoing series, Facades, depicts made-up towns where lone facades hide nothing, teetering on the edge of physics.
Gaudrillot-Roy told Gizmodo he was inspired by the empty facades of movie sets. The series is based off of photographs he took in Montreal and the suburbs of France, which he than meticulously altered in Photoshop to subtract the buildings and add a convincing background.
“The façade is the first thing we see, it’s the surface of a building It can be impressive, superficial or safe,” he writes (in broken English) in an artist’s statement. “Just like during a wandering through a foreign city, I walk through the streets with these questions: what will happen if we stick to that first vision? If the daily life of ‘The Other’ was only a scenery? 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.”
Perhaps what’s most unsettling are the small and intimate details that seem like proof of people living here: cars, bikes, a grill, even laundry hanging out to dry on the balcony. Paired with the implausibly thin facades, they seem disconcerting in their falseness. See more of Gaudrillot-Roy’s work below and at his site. [Zacharie Gaudrillot-Roy via Colossal]
