Thursday, February 21, 2013

2- Amanda Schweizer submits Romain Laurent

Romain Laurent's images evoke both humor and intrigue.  I found myself chuckling at his images, but was then left scratching my head wondering how he accomplished the illusions in his images.

Laurent's Tilt series depicts street scenes in which the character is upright and the street is off-kilter... or is the other way around?  Interpretation is left to the viewer.  The shadows match the rest of the scene, yet you see no support wires or posts to explain this trick of the eye.  They are most intriguing.


His TAS series cracks me up in that there are piles of objects, even people, spilling out of doorways into the path of an "innocent bystander" who seems puzzled, but not alarmed, by what he/she sees.  There seems to be a theme of how cluttered our lives are and how things just seem to pile up until an avalanche cuts loose.  His avalanches include people, record albums, shoes, and even fish.  In the office hallway image, I really appreciate how the avalanche spills out, then starts to creep up the opposite wall.  It reminds me of a real avalanche site I visited in the Colorado Rockies where a similar phenomenon occurred as trees were leveled as the avalanche flowed down the mountain, across the road, and up the face of the mountain on the other side of the road.  It was very surreal.


Laurent's L'Horizon series reminds me of my surfer cousin from Corpus Christi who now lives in New York City and always seems a bit lost in the sea of people. The surfer in the images is completely out of place, searching the horizon for the next big break.  It's dreamlike in that he is floating above the sidewalks and streets, oblivious to what is going on around him.  Yup, that's Josh alright!






As I stated before, I really appreciate the humor and intrigue Laurent captures in his images, as well as the amount of time and effort that goes into each shooting session.  Bravo for making us study the images to figure out how they were accomplished and keeping us chuckling at the same time.
View more of his images at:  www.romain-laurent.com/

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