Katy Cowan interviewed Laurent Kronental for Creative Boom and discussed his latest photo series, entitled Souvenir d’un Futur which explored the forgotten brutalist estates of Paris:
Tinted with melancholy, his resulting photographic series, Souvenir d’un Futur, exposes these unsung suburban areas but reveals a beauty behind the modernist utopia that had so much promise and wonder. A project that was four years in the making, Laurent combines a mixture of sensitive portraits of older residents along with beautiful architectural photographs that offer pleasing geometric compositions of what feels like a crumbling, ghostly world.
Kronental said he was inspired by his time living in China and that’s where he discovered photography.
“The big cities of this territory stunned me by their gigantic size, their tentacular immoderation, their paradoxes, their metamorphosises, their contrasts and the way the human being lives in this abundant and overpopulated town planning.”
There’s a lot of brutalism in Kronental’s shots interspersed with the people who live in and around the buildings. Old, pale, and grey seems to be the running theme, intentional or otherwise.
French/concrete/photography related: If you like brutalism, check out the Concrete Montreal Map by Blue Crow Media. And what about Arnaud Montagard’s photo series, “The road not taken”?
(Featured image: all rights reserved © Laurent Kronental)