photography
Photography: Tokyo Murmurings By Franck Bohbot
Photography: Tokyo Murmurings
By Los Angeles Based Photographer Franck Bohbot
ABOUT FRANCK BOHBOT
Franck Bohbot was Born in 1980 in Longjumeau, south Paris, France. Self taught photographer he moved to New York City in 2013. He is a documentarian with an eye for the theatrical who found his way to photography by way of cinema. Although he turned his focus fully to photography in 2008, beginning his career as a unit still photographer on short film sets, the formal and aesthetic influences of the cinematographic form unsurprisingly continue to underlie hispresent work. Bohbot’s photographic work inhabits a space between reality and fantasy, documenting and storytelling, every frame – to borrow a phrase from Nan Goldin – like a still from a nonexistent film. He has drawn artistic inspiration from figures as diverse as Jeff Wall, Luigi Ghirri, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Edward Hopper, William Eggleston and Martin Scorsese.
Bohbot frequently takes a formal, typological approach to crafting visual narratives, highlighting the surreal symmetries of our constructed worlds and capturing the poetry of everyday places with a unique attentiveness to the interplay of light and color. He employs the latter two elements as tools of nostalgia, exploring loss and obsolescence by crafting images that are as much about what is invisible or lacking aswhat is there within the frame. Rendering public spaces, street scenes, and architectural sites of interest in his distinctive painterly palette, he documents inanimate structures with all the sensitivity of a human portrait, as though constructing an imaginary archive of social spaces for a post- apocalyptic timecapsule.
His work has received widespread critical acclaim, and has appeared in a range of international publications including The New York Times, National Geographic, New York Magazine, Wired, or Vogue. Awards include the 2013 International Photography Award for Swimming Pool and the 2014 Archifoto Prize for Chinatown. In 2013, Bohbot was commissioned by the Musée du Louvre to photograph their gallery interiors, later in the same year, he began his nocturnal exploration of New York, Light On.
His Chinatown series was exhibited in the group show ‘Les Couleurs de l’Architecture’ (‘The Colours of Architecture’) at La Chambre gallery in Strasbourg, France in 2014, and in 2015 as part of a collaboration with the British designer Paul Smith, he received a solo show of his series Swimming Pool at the Paul Smith Space Gallery in Shibuya, Tokyo. In the same year, he began two new series, one on the streets of Tokyo and another entitled I Am An Actor about the divide between struggling actors’ professional passion and daily reality. He now lives with his two beautiful daughters and wife in Los Angeles
