True illusions

At night, a city behaves completely differently than during daytime. We can hear the sound of our steps echoing in the empty streets. Everything is only shadows, impressions, illusions… The darkness combined to the fatigue accumulated during the day blur our vision of reality. It makes us witness events in slow motion. Real events? Or is it just pure fantasy? We are floating in between dream and reality. Life becomes furtive…

This photographic series is articulated in the style of filmmaking often met in the post-World War II era : the film noir. Crime dramas with stark high-contrast lighting effects, tilted camera in pure Expressionistic style, and a cynical, noir (anti-)hero presenting a moral ambiguity, a fatalistic outlook, and an alienation from the society in a bleak atmosphere. This collection of analog photographs, shot in Prague streets, shows the thin border between fiction and reality and reveals that a fictional story can be easily created from real facts… and most probably vice versa.

Prague, Czech Republic.

The darkness of these films noirs reflects the disenchantment of the times. Pessimism and disillusionment became increasingly present in the American psyche during the Great Depression of the 1930s and the world war that followed. After the war, factors such as an unstable peacetime economy, McCarthyism, and the looming threat of atomic warfare manifested themselves in a collective sense of uncertainty. The corrupt and claustrophobic world of film noir embodied these fears.