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]