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Leo Fabrizio

Awarded

Leo Fabrizio

Photo research 'Dream World'

Photography

Jury report

Built dreams in 'Gated Communities'
In his photo re­search 'Dream World' the pho­tog­ra­pher Leo Fab­rizio pur­sues built am­bi­tions. What do houses tell about their oc­cu­pants? A ghostly empty golf course at night, flood­lit, is one of the places where a ris­ing mid­dle class amuses it­self. A place that em­bod­ies so­cial ad­vance­ment, sta­tus and power. A big ad­ver­tise­ment hoard­ing in the land­scape gives the photo se­ries its title: 'Dream World'. In what coun­try are we re­ally? On some pic­tures one rec­og­nizes Thai type­faces and only due to them one is able to lo­cate the oth­er­wise face­less scener­ies. Over­passes flood­lit at night are ev­i­dence of moder­nity. The cam­era is po­si­tioned pre­cisely, the pho­tog­ra­pher's gaze is un­for­giv­ing. Peo­ple are com­pletely ab­sent. Where are the in­hab­i­tants? They are prob­a­bly at work. Or stay­ing in­side their highly ty­po­log­i­cally pho­tographed air-con­di­tioned houses. Leo Fab­rizio takes pic­tures of these houses with an ab­solutely artis­tic am­bi­tion and stylises them into a scenery, rem­i­nis­cent of the ty­po­log­i­cal pic­tures of Bernd and Hilla Becher. The prop­er­ties be­long to 'Vil­lages', set­tle­ments for the Thai mid­dle class out­side the Moloch Bangkok with such flat­ter­ing names as 'The El­e­gance' or 'Neo-City'. In the seem­ingly end­less se­ries of pic­tures it be­comes ap­par­ent how stan­dard­ised these dream es­tates are: big log­gias, tow­ers and oriels are build­ing types con­sid­ered de­sir­able by the mid­dle class. They look Amer­i­can, in­ter­na­tion­ally face­less and can styl­is­ti­cally hardly be placed within the Thai tra­di­tion. Ref­er­ences to local ar­chi­tec­ture are com­pletely ab­sent. In fact they are the kind of anti-places one passes by very quickly with­out ever re­mem­ber­ing. Yet, the fact that at one still looks at them and won­ders who might live in these houses is due to the work of pho­tog­ra­pher Leo Fab­rizio.
Peter Stohler

Biography

Leo Fabrizio
Born in
1976
Education
designer HES, communication visuelle, spécialisation photographie

Web

www.leofabrizio.com

also in

2003

2011

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