Awarded
Leo Fabrizio
'Archetypal Landscape', photographic research
Photography
Leo Fabrizio
Leo Fabrizio
Jury report
The Quest for the Archetypal
What do photographers tell us who transcend what is directly shown in their pictures? 'Archetypal Landscape' is a work in progress, an extensive body of photographs on which Leo Fabrizio has been working for ten years. Fabrizio is looking for what could be described as some kind of universal visual language which transcends cultures, languages and religions. The aspect that the ECAL-trained photographer is, time and again, interested in is the pair of opposites: constructed versus natural. The central question for him is what place conjures up ideas of a utopia. If in the past landscapes were places of utopia in his opinion, they are increasingly replaced by the cities themselves which are now actual city landscapes attracting hopes for a better life. This is especially clear in his city portrayal of Hong Kong by night. The gaze wanders from the highest point of the city down to the nightly sea of high-rise buildings. In that sense, Hong Kong is archetypal: it was not only built as a city but, with its skyline, also with the purpose of functioning as a ‘designed' image. Another work illustrates Fabrizio's interest in dreamed-up places: somewhere in the periphery of Bangkok, huge billboards with 'Dreamworld' written on them tower above humble fishing huts – an advertisement for new middle-class residential developments (published in the illustrated book 'Dreamworld', 2010). Before that he used to take pictures of bunkers in the Swiss countryside, adopting a similarly typological approach – what all his photographic works have in common is his fascination with a 'fabricated' landscape. If only little room is given to nature in his city representations of Hong Kong and Chicago, he does, in other photographs, occasionally show a waterfall in the middle of a tropical landscape which seems pristine and devoid of human presence. But here too we are probably dealing with an image which we always 'fabricate' in our head first before the photographer then actually finds it somewhere in reality. Already a winner in 2002 and 2003, Leo Fabrizio is awarded a prize for the third time for his consistent photographic work.
Peter Stohler
Biography
Leo Fabrizio
Born in
1976
Education
designer HES, communication visuelle, spécialisation photographie
Web
www.leofabrizio.com
also in
