Biography

Jérémie Roux was born in Paris in 1975, bought his first SLR camera at age 17, and moved to the US in 1998 to pursue a Master's degree in Computer Graphics. After graduating in 2000, he lived in San Francisco and worked in different start-ups in Silicon Valley. In 2005, he moved back to Paris to pursue a career in the fashion and photography industry.

Artist Statement

Emmanuel Kant wrote in the Critique of the Aesthetic Judgment that art is not the representation of a beautiful thing, but the beautiful representation of something. I aspire to embody Kant's idea in my photography, as I strive to reveal the graphical beauty of the most ordinary scenes and objects that surround me.

Since the end of 2003, the focus of my photography has been urban landscapes at night, concentrating on subjects such as highways, buildings, and construction sites. Even more recently, I have started capturing details of interior scenes including escalators, phone booths, drinking fountains and chairs; like the urban exteriors, these objects are not seen under sunlight, only illuminated by artificial lights. I have come to appreciate and desire the saturated colors and unusual effects that I discovered in long nocturnal exposures on daylight transparency film. Details that exist only as hints to the human eye are fully revealed in my photographs. Unexpected colors are discovered through varying types of light: incandescents unveil deep yellow and orange hues, fluorescents emit an eerie greenish glow. In addition to these colors, rays of light appear when the motion of light sources is recorded. Halos that are also often invisible are uncovered after long exposures in mist and foggy skies.

I started taking photographs in 1992, primarily of journalistic and travel-related subjects. My recent concentration on these urban night scenes has been strongly influenced by the work of Michael Kenna and Christopher Griffith, and I have come to enjoy the process associated with realizing this body of work. Living in an industrial neighborhood in San Francisco provides access to many interesting urban and developing areas. At night, this access is virtually unlimited; I feel a much-appreciated kind of freedom, as I have no time constraints for my work, nor do I depend on the presence of people or particular activities.

Although the images I produce may be distorted views of reality, a strong sense of recognition remains because of the familiar and ordinary scenes that are portrayed. And while these landscapes and objects may not be traditionally considered beautiful, I hope that the hyper-reality in my photographs - this alternate representation of something - may reveal as beautiful a "something" otherwise overlooked.