Parisian artist Dylan Degery returns to RAWGUE. with a new series of photographs from his home city, in particular the ‘Front de Seine’ urban project.
“Since I was old enough to take the train by myself, these futuristic yet intimidating buildings acting as the West Paris guardians were my threshold between the suburbs and Paris,” the artist recalls. With his keen eye for structure and symmetrical composition, the photographer once again aces the portrayal of those “architectural giants.”
“Nowhere else in this city can you feel this amazing mix of nostalgia and grandiosity,” he states. And nowhere else can a viewer feel the exact same combination but in Degery’s portfolio. His style and framing, solely focused on buildings, is free of human presence. Buildings are not passive creations of architects but characters with individual and independent presences, coexisting with people that pass by them, live and work in them, and photograph them. Skyscrapers are like protectors of the city, similar to Tolkien’s Ents.
Degery reminds us to look up and to search for harmony in the midst of any concrete jungle. This way we might feel liberated and surrounded by architecture rather than suffocated and oppressed by several dozen story-high Goliaths. His architectural structures are compelling titans of glass and concrete, towering over the Parisian landscape. A predilection for uniformity, symmetry, and fractal ratios is a clear choice the photographer makes when zooming in on building facades, their glaring corners, their shadows, and their interesting reflections.
This series marks the photographer’s transition from the larger-than-life, brutalist-influenced architecture of eastern Germany to what appears to be a more colorful, horizon-oriented new architecture in the French capital. “After exploring parts of Berlin for my previous photographic project, it only felt right to tackle my home turf and try to encapsulate the very particular feeling that is this area,” Degery explains.
In this collection, the photographer showcases, through an optimistic vision and an inquisitive curiosity, the transition between old and new. He doesn’t see it as a conflict or a battle of the ages, but rather as an interpretative phenomenon from which it is easy to draw conclusions and parallels. He says that these works intend to capture the borderline existing “at the halfway point between the futuristic vision of the ‘70s and the fading of those very ideas,” considering the result to be “a unique bubble of creativity in the heart of Paris.”
Read our “Roots” issue in full
The new theme, born as usual from what the submitted works held in common, is “ROOTS.” Within its pages, we present the artworks, creativity, and inspiration of 60 visual artists and writers from 21 countries around the world. Their diverse voices come together around a shared exploration of the return to where one belongs, the invisible threads of tradition that shape identity, and the ongoing reconnection with nature, others, and oneself.
We’re a team of writers using our craft to spotlight art in its most honest form. RAWGUE. started as a bi-monthly editorial experiment where each issue’s theme is dictated by the submitted work, thus removing editorial bias from the equation and preserving a more raw approach. We focus on all forms of poetry: written, photographed, painted, drawn, and filmed.
