What’s Wrong With This Picture? In this, the first part of a short series on the work of photographers and artists who like to bend the built truth, Jeanette Kunsmann shares the fabulous photographic fictions of Filip Dujardin.
Reality is never singular, always multiple – forming the basis for all sorts of plays on fact and fiction. Architects, too, use renderings and visualisations to create imaginary worlds that promise something new and transport the future into the present as a true-to-life image. Today, realistic renderings and retouched architectural photography can scarcely be told apart. Almost unnoticed, as an incidental phenomenon on the margins of specialised architecture platforms, a visual idiom has emerged in recent years, that uses a handful of tricks to turn familiar real buildings into surreal fictions.
In his work, Filip Dujardin (born 1971 in Ghent), one of the best-known new photo-visionaries, deals with the fine line between the plausible and the unreal. The pictures in his plainly-titled Fictions series are impossible, illogical, but not unfamiliar – perhaps because of the “historical patina” that he always works into them. With his approach, this art and architecture photographer deliberately distances himself from today’s conventional methods of depicting real architecture. He describes his works as “hi-tech structures with lo-tech shells”.
– Jeanette Kunsmann is a freelance journalist and editor at BauNetz
First published in Baunetzwoche #349
