21

This building is owned by the STM (Montreal’s public transportation agency) and was probably built around the 50’s, just on the onset of the decline of the industrial era.
What we may mistake for poor maintenance and care of the building may very well be in fact intentional, especially when one takes in consideration the vocation of the location.

“21″ is the cemetery of the STM.
It is where they put the destroyed and vandalized buses that are of no use anymore.

What monument would be more fitting than this then? When we know they dispose of the machinery here, can we not see this building as a mechanical mausoleum?

Office space

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been wondering what was going in those huge and blocky concrete towers. Since I never had the chance to enter an office space, I’m left imagining what could be happening in those cubicles.

This is about what I see when I think of office spaces.

(Work realized in the frame of my Studio class. The assignment was to create a scene and give it a mood by using the lightning, I went for a fluorescent lightning quality and style. I wanted to avoid the cliché and easy “dark” mood that such an image could have radiated, instead I wanted to create a more ambiguous and “grey” atmosphere.)

Textiles, I love you

Experiments in post industrial photography:

A sea of lead

First post of a series on Post Industrial landscapes.

(To get in the proper viewing mood, I recommend viewing the images on black and listening to the song Von by Sigur Ros, which I listened to as I processed the images).

View on black

View on black

Études narratives photographiques

This is my first series of serious photographic studies on narration and mise en scène.

This series had first started as a series of fake forensics images from the early 1980’s, before it became something else. Over the course of the shooting sessions, my approach gradually and instinctively transformed. Without any conscious act, I continued working, naturally and almost machinely to the end of that series.

Slowly, this work brought me closer to my own photographic vision and took me closer to finally finding myself a coherent visual aesthetic. To achieve that fully, I intend on continuing to experimenting with narrative imagery and mise en scènes.

Première série d’études photographiques sérieuses sur le thème de la narration et de la mise en scène.

Ce travail avait commencé comme une série d’images de fausses scènes de crime de 1981 avant de se transformer. Au fil des sessions de travail, mon approche s’est transformée graduellement et instinctivement sans acte conscient. J’ai donc poursuivi le travail de facon fluide, presque machinalement, jusqu’à la fin.

Tranquillement, cette série m’a mené sur la voie de ma propre vision et d’une style photographique enfin cohérent. Pour ce faire, j’ai l’intention de continuer à explorer la mise en scène et la préméditation de l’image.

“Lesbians out of hell”

Assignement for my History of photography class.
I had to do a photograph in the style of Joel Peter Witkin.

“Witkin is an American photographer that works mostly with the marginalized people of society, the forgotten, the deformed, the handicapped and so on…
His photographs tend to be dramatic and not unlike a romantic renaissance painting, with elements careful disposed around the scene to create a mysterious and holy tale inspired by the oldest myths of man.“

Jean Guy

“Jean Guy you are a stuped
man one day
you will will
know why man”

Montreal Churches: Eglise St-Germain

Very few information is available about the Church of the parish of St-Germain in Outremont. Built in 1911, St-Germain church would have been built to accommodate the growing need for more roman catholic cult locations (Outremont had seen its french population increase at the end of the 19th century, wich increased the proportion of catholics in the municipality). Prior to the construction, some of the catholics of Outremont had to attends masses in the church of Notre-dame-de-la-cote-des-neiges parish.

Peu d’informations circulent sur l’église de la paroisse de St-Germain d’Outremont. Construite en 1911, l’église St-Germain aurait eu pour but de permettre aux fidèles catholiques d’Outremont (qui s’est rapidement francisé à la fin du 19e siècle, augmentant la proportion de catholiques dans la municipalité) d’avoir un lieu de culte et une paroisse situés près d’eux. Les fidèles s’étant autrefois parfois rendu jusqu’à la paroisse de la Notre-dame-de-la-côte-des-neiges pour se recueuillir.

The little people

Photo montage realized for my studio class and my photoshop class:

I used this image as the base of the montage, shot from the top of the school:

Then, in the studio, I recreated the same lightning and shot little toys at the same angles on a “seamless” grey background:

Then, I had to integrate the little cars and the little man in the other image. The integration of all the elements was the most tedious and it took a couple of hours (and scrapped montages) to finally come to a pleasing result.

I’m pretty happy with the result of that assignment as it allowed me to explore and experiment in montages, construction of realities and integration of elements of different scales that give a slightly bizzare aspect to the image. I plan on exploring more in that vein and next time, add human scaled elements into a miniature environment.

Redscale Experiment: part 5

Asleep

“Stay asleep”

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_Live)