Alban Lécuyer – Here Soon
“Can contemporary cities project themselves in some sort of tangible future? Are places transformed in conformity with the architects plans and with the artists visions destined to promote luxury housing projects?”
Carretera de Siboney, Santiago, Cuba, 2012
The computer-generated images posted on construction sites have inherited their codes from marketing strategies. It is not just about one product being sold but also about the promise that a newly invented architecture or a new traffic plan can give birth to a new city with few vehicles and few pets, with mainly white, female and fair-haired people moving about in a ‘capsular’ [1] society in which architecture has brought about its own isolated environment, circumscribed to the sole limits of a building or the portion of a road. Contrasts are light, and shadows, which are the symbols of doubt and uncertainty, reduced to a minimum. All there is between the spectator and the project – trees, vehicles, passers-by and so on – are shown in transparency. It is a valueless representation of reality with no dead angles and where people seem partially away from the set.
The HERE SOON series offer to transpose an actual everyday place and an ordinary way of living in the city into the aesthetics of those stylized perspectives. The images show graffiti on walls, clothes or satellite dishes on windowsills, abandoned objects on pavements, worn out spaces – all of which indicate that civilizations produce traces and leave footprints on the spaces that they occupy. The lives of actual individuals or those who inhabit the place contradict the prospective value of those images, because of the role played by memory and experience of places. As it goes back to the past history of housing policies in the second half of the 20th century, the HERE SOON series point implicitly at the commonplace statements of a disembodied and dispirited architecture which is more and more cut out from the spaces in which it supposed to take place.
[1] Term coined by Philosopher Lieven de Cauter
Reparto Camilo Cienfuegos I, La Havane, Cuba, 2012
Allée Beau-Rivage I, Nantes, France, 2012
Place Carpeaux, Puteaux, France, 2012
Square Dunois, Paris, France, 2012
Malecon I, Baracoa, Cuba, 2012
Rue Émile-Zola, Rezé, France, 2011
Reparto Camilo Cienfuegos II, La Havane, Cuba, 2012
More images and other interesting projects can be found on Alban Lécuyer’s website. Alban Lécuyer was born in Paris in 1977. After studying journalism at the Superior School of Journalism of Lille, he worked as a journalist and a press photographer for regional newspapers, websites and independent reviews such as L’œil électrique, Trouble(s) and Combat face au Sida. For the moment he teaches the History of Photography and the Interpretation of Pictures at the DMA of Nantes and contributes to various magazines like Tête-à-tête, Fragil, etc. His personal projects focus on the identity of different neighborhoods and on the place of all and sundry facing the alteration of urban spaces. Alban Lecuyer is represented by the galerie Wall30.
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