With his new book Distances Volume II, the Parisian photographer continues to impose his signature by magnifying architecture in its smallest details.
Romain Laprade has been passionate about architecture, design, and landscapes since his adolescence. This thirty-year-old photographer, a former graphic designer at Vogue and Holiday, often favors the interaction between nature and urban structures. He has exhibited around the world and published several fine books (Distances, No Water), while collaborating with architects, brands, and magazines. His photographic grammar is drawn from modernism and brutalism. He travels the world’s cities (Los Angeles, New York, Athens, Menorca, Venice…), capturing the particularities of architecture during his peregrinations. His portfolio always reveals this sense of composition, playing with the geometry of spaces, surrounding materials, lines, patterns, textures, reflections, and rays of light. A purified vision with a palette of warm colors, sometimes pastel, often outdated vintage.
Photographic vocabulary
His signature is thus based on this material approach of the anodyne, ordinary, even insignificant element. Interior or exterior spaces, his minimalist compositions capture fragments (objects, ornaments, buildings, structures…), to the point of telling the story of the place itself. If the human presence is rare, the place of nature, trees, and plants dress the frame. Cactus and Monstera Deliciosa are never very far from his objective, just like the mosaic tiles on the walls of the lobbies of buildings and swimming pools, or the iconic residential works of Ricardo Bofill, John Lautner, and Richard Neutra. This second volume of Distances is a selection of images drawn from a body of photographs accumulated during his travels over the past three years. Romain Laprade thus continues to observe his environment with attention and gives details a new aesthetic dimension.
© Romain Laprade
Nathalie Dassa