Nature plays a central role. In Paris, trees are pruned and shaped according to classical ideals. Urban nature is ordered, aestheticised, and controlled for beauty, regulation, and relief from city life. Within the book, these trees are given a quiet voice through text, bridging inner and outer landscapes. They become reflections of containment, resilience and adaptation.
By frequently depicting nature in the absence of people, the series suspends the city outside of time. Paris appears both constructed and organic, restrained yet alive. The relationship between urban space and nature becomes an allegory for our relationship with ourselves: how we impose structure, how we seek freedom, and how we negotiate control.
At its core, Faux Paris questions authenticity, what is real and what is constructed, what is timeless and what is performative. The city becomes a metaphor for identity itself. Though urbanism reveals humanity’s impulse to dominate and organise, the work suggests an underlying persistence that nature, like truth, inevitably resurfaces.
Faux Paris is a photobook developed after a year living in Paris between 2019 and 2020. The project examines how the city has been historically romanticised through photography, while quietly observing its contemporary tensions.
Influenced by photobooks such as Paris des Rêves (Izis Bidermanas, 1950), Paris de Nuit (Brassaï, 1931), and Banlieue de Paris (Robert Doisneau, 1949), the work reflects on the poetic image of Paris constructed through humanist photography and cinema. In contrast, Faux Paris situates itself within a more fragile present, shaped by transport strikes, the Gilets Jaunes protests, and the early emergence of COVID-19.
The book combines candid street photography of people, architecture, and nature with metaphysical texts. Borrowing from the poem-photograph structure of Paris des Rêves, image and language operate together to question perception, presence, and belonging. The city becomes both subject and mirror between internal and external worlds.
Living in Paris as an outsider intensified this process. The language barrier created a heightened awareness and a quiet distance that sharpened observation. The camera became a tool for meditation: a way to process new surroundings and to examine the balance between subject and environment.
