When I was young, I drove on the road many times with my parents and I have always been intrigued by these great walls surrounding this houses as well as the gates with protruding pikes.
I didn’t understand why people wanted to hide themselves and above all, why they chose to condemn themselves to an obstructed view. I pictured them living in the shadow of their wall. Later I had understood that it was about the notion of property.
Bill Brandt said : « It is part of the photographer’s job to see more intensely than most people do. He must have and keep in him something of the receptiveness of the child who looks at the world for the first time or of the traveler who enters a strange country. »
This is what occured in this series. About a year ago, I was walking when I saw the roof of a house emerging from a giant hedge. The first question I asked myself was : is the house half hidden or half exposed ? I then used my hands to make a frame. Inside there were three simple forms : a large green strip, an orange tiled roof whith a center window, under an overcast sky. The picture spoke by itself . Plants are a part of nature, but walls are a part of culture. They provide us with an artificial protection from the eyes of the world. Inside, they conceal what we’re hiding ; outside, what we’d like to see. Which probably explains this odd habit we have of trimming our hedges just like we cut stone or cast reinforced concrete. Since that day I search for these combined forms in France. I would like to expanded my searchs to other countries in order to expose this disturbing uniformity despite a variety of architecture, hedges and colours.
ABOUT ALEXANDRA DAVY
After completing studies at the Nancy School of Fine Art, Alexandra Davy integrates the Toulouse School of photography from which she graduated in 2013. She moves to Paris and starts working in a photographic studio as an assistant (Studio Daguerre). At the same time she continues her personal work.
Her visual approach is based on the ideas of identity and absence. Concepts that appear in the otherness of the places she photographs or creates (see her series “Faux-‐ Semblant“). Her admiration for painters such as Edouard Hopper and Giorgio De Chirico drives her toward a pure and minimalist aesthetiscs.
She currently works on a new series of portrait. With seven other photographers, Alexandra forms the collective Prisme Noir whose ambition is to push back each other’s limits and move forward together in a permanent search for a real complementarity. Alexandra is now represented by the Gallery ChipChop. [Official Website]
