François Prost: Location, Location, Location
November 15th, 2020
Graphic designer turned photographer, François Prost’s work exists somewhere on the fine line between fantasy and reality. Whilst his locations and subjects are real, his background exploring semiotics and visual communication allows a unique perspective on what space and society really is. Surreal and yet mundane, nostalgic yet contemporary, his aesthetic interrogation of place asks the viewer to consider what location really means. Public Offerings caught up with François to talk more about why travel is good for the mind and where his interest in architectural doppelgängers began.
POL: First up can you introduce yourself and your work to our readers?
FP: My name is Francois Prost, I’m a Parisian art director and photographer. I was born in the 80’s in Lyon, France, and I now live in Paris with my wife and two kids.
I started my career working as a designer and art director, and decided a few years ago to develop more personal work as a photographer. Today, my work is mostly driven by photography, whether it is in developing personal projects or working on assignments. I’m still working as a designer, but this tends to become less and less common.
POL: As a graphic designer you have a clear love of typography and you can see this graphic eye coming into your photography work. Does having a design background influence the type of photography you take? Did you design aesthetic change when you started to focus on photography projects?
FP: I graduated from a Belgian graphic design school in the 2000’s, joined Fabrica afterwards and then worked for several years across different studios and advertising agencies, creating brand identities or campaigns. Then, after realising I made it professionally, I started to feel the need to build something more personal. From there I launched several photographic projects that eventually became more and more important to me.
Beside the fact that photography is a way to develop more personal work, while art direction and design has been always a way of earning my money to me, I would say both disciplines consist of creating images and you can therefore find many similarities. My way of practicing photography is definitely influenced by my graphic design background.
In term of form, first thing people teaches you in a graphic design school is to to make sure your designs are readable and understandable, then you can start adding aesthetic and more complicated storytelling. I applied this when I started photography, as I thought it would be a good starting point, especially knowing that I never took any lessons and always felt a little bit of a photographer imposter.
In terms of content, when you work on an assignment as a graphic designer, you create visual items to communicate something to an audience. But to create a visual, you need to work with the visual codes the audience will understand. Typography is mainly about this: when you choose the typography for a design, it needs to communicate something that is linked to the content of the design, so you need to know a lot about typography history and codes.
Photography and images in general are also driven by this semantic process. Of course photography is emotional, but those emotions are driven by our education and personal experience, and this is what I’m interested in. was photographing. I am looking for interesting people, situations, and do my best to show them in an exciting light.
In those terms, I would say good photography is photography that is understandable and readable. Everything else comes from the audience’s subjective judgment, and that is linked to social and educational environment. I think this point is quite important in my approach. Doing photography is a way for me to combat cultural cliché and interrogate my preconceptions about human behaviour and people’s social and educational environments.
POL: What’s interesting is your work is so theoretically and philosophically rich, however it doesn’t come across as dry. In fact your work has such a clear sense of humour, do you think this is something all photographers should have?
FP: I like to use humour through my photography, I think it is a great way to make people interrogate and face themselves and their internal contradictions. It’s efficient and non-violent, so I think it’s a really good way to talk to the viewer. But there are many other ways too, photography can work lots of different ways - as long as you’re surprised.
POL: A lot of your work is very locational - what is it that drew you to landscapes and, even when shooting a form of portraiture (for example in Château Rouge or Chinese Scooters) linking your images so clearly to a location or place?
FP: I often think of photography as related to travelling. It’s very cliché to say that, but I think it’s true, as, for me, travelling is a way of finding a new regard for our world and to break from daily life. Generally, travelling suggests a classic vacation to a holiday resort, but you could also be “travelling” by sleeping for a few days in a hotel in your own neighbourhood. You’ll be in your own neighbourhood but you’ll live an alien experience of it. Somehow it can change your mind about things… finding this new angle on things is what makes travelling exciting for me.
POL: In projects like Gentleman’s Club and After Party, how did you go about finding the locations you where going to shoot?
FP: I started the After Party project a long time ago, so it came a little bit randomly. I was on a several day bike trip, with a friend of mine, in the middle of the French country side. We stopped in a parking lot of a remote night club, and I took some pictures of it without any intentions or plans. A few months later, I saw those pictures again and thought there would be many other place like this club and decided it would be a great subject to document. From there I started looking on google maps and different specialised website on nightclubs, and started building maps with all the venues I wanted to shoot. For After Party, the body of work built over many years, and started slowly.
For Gentlemen’s Club though, that is a more recent project, and I had to be quick and efficient, as going the USA to shoot is expensive. I took five weeks to cross the US, driving from Miami to Los Angeles and had planned all the locations on Google Maps I wanted to shoot. I also found new ones while driving, but most of the locations were scouted digitally previously. It was a very organised process actually!
POL: The images in After Party and Gentleman’s Club, are almost surreal, in that they are photographs of spaces almost always seen at night, yet captured in the day time. There is something about this transition which makes the images very quiet and evocative, rather than the loudness of their provocative night time facades. Can you tell us a little about the inspiration behind the works? Was is a purposeful exploration at nostalgia, or did this evolve over time?
FP: For the nightclubs that I photographed in After Party, the intention was always to shoot night venues by daylight. Showing them in a more neutral way than how you usually see them, lit up with the glow of bright neon light. As everyone did, I had some nights out during my teenagers years, and I remember seeing those places as very subversive and seductive. Having grown up since then, I thought it would be interesting to take some distance and analyse the codes that make them look subversive, their visual language says a lot about us as a society. I tried to analyse and deconstruct the artifice that lies in those facades. At the same time though, I was giving tribute to those venues that are important to people’s lives - these are the venues of the first proper kiss, a first fight or first adult frustrations…
POL: With these projects, your aesthetic, whilst quite colourful, also feels quite minimalist. How would you describe your photographic style?
FP: Colourful, Graphic, Luminous.
POL: That sense of social memory is so interesting, and you come back to this as a theme across a lot of your work. In your projects Paris Syndrome and Venice Syndrome, for example, you are also looking at shared cultural memory, but also seem to be examining the difference between reality and fantasy. Where did you interest in this juxtaposition come from?
FP: A few years ago, I read some articles about a Chinese architectural/urban planning project that was trying to build in the exact same way stereotypical European locations look. Recreating typical places; like vineyards or castles from south of France, Austrian villages, Florence’s streets, Dutch towns, elements of Parisian architecture and many other symbols from European ancient cultures.
We’ve all seen theme parks creating miniatures of famous building from around the world, just like we’ve all seen Las Vegas or Dubai’s replica’s of Venice’s canals or the Eiffel Tower, which plays with the same tropes. But in this case it seemed more extreme and obsessive, as those new towns in China were much bigger and were being planned as real neighbourhoods, with people living there as they would live anywhere else. Whereas in theme parks or in Las Vegas/Dubai, there is more of a distance between the elements that are built, they are just there as a tourist attraction, this Chinese project didn’t have this distance. It stirred up my curiosity.
Having identified the place as a potential photographic subject, I started thinking about what and how to photograph it…
“Doing photography is a way for me to combat cultural cliché and interrogate my preconceptions about human behaviour and people’s social and educational environments.”
Behind architecture, I think I was very curious about how would people live in a place built on the same appearance of an other. Except from the architecture, there is nothing much that connects those two locations and I think it’s an interesting prism. It says a lot about cliché, appearance and behaviour. We are all constructing ourselves in regards with our roots, education, culture, families, friends, and seeing this place built on a complete different culture makes it very curious.
I also read recently an article of an American journalist (Our French Connection by Rosecrans Baldwin) that went across the US to visit and investigate every town called Paris (there are around twenty of them). The journalist wanted to understand the origin, the reason, and the influence of this “naming”, he also wanted to analyse the connections between those different places and the “original” Paris, and the consistency of the french cliché remaining in the US. So he went to those different “Paris“ and asked people living there about it. He soon came to the conclusion that people there were living as they would live anywhere else in USA, and weren’t very sensitive about the origin of the naming of their town.
Being interested in the article and the subject, I thought this could be interesting to translate it visually. First, I came up first with the idea of photographing every “Eiffel Tower” from the around world, but it looked too ambitious money-wise. This is when I remembered the place in China where Romain Gavras filmed his music video for Jamie XX, and decided it would be very interesting to compare actual sites from Paris with this Chinese replica.
The subject seemed very interesting to me, not because of Paris especially but because of cultural references and cliché. I was always fascinated by the concept of cultural self appropriation, like the mini-Paris or the mini-Venice they recreated in Vegas or in Dubai. First because it’s not natural and therefore always awkward, that produces interesting failures and imperfections, and those failures says a lot about the culture of the people who built it. And, secondly, because it blurs our idea of reality, it looses us in translation, you don’t know anymore which is the real from the replica.
Arriving in the Paris replica of Tianducheng, I felt quite lost in the first days as nobody were speaking a word of English and I had to communicate with people through a smartphone translation application which was exacerbating the awkward situation. The thing I came to see though was that beside the Parisian architecture, there isn’t that much of a Parisian atmosphere. People living in Tianducheng live there as they would live anywhere else in China, they ride their electric scooters towards replicas of antique sculptures like anywhere else and they eat fried noodles like anywhere else. The place hosts mainly middle class people and families, which makes it a very calm place. People go to bed early and wake up early. By day, many people go to work in the city centre, which takes one hour by bus. By evening/night they have a little walk or group dance session in the main square and then they go to sleep.
In terms of food, this is also a very Chinese average place, with many street canteens and restaurants that serves fresh and basic Chinese dishes. When I was going out there I was thinking maybe they would also have tried to recreate a French restaurant, but I mainly ate soups, fried noodles and fried rice. I only saw a place selling naturally cooked “brioches” but it looked more like an “Starbucks food” than a traditional french brioche. The brioche was very good though.
POL: So you started with Paris, what made you extend this project and look at Venice?
FP: I will always remember the first time I went to Venice. I was 23. I arrived there by train on my own, and as soon as I got out of the train station, I had this strange feeling of not knowing if what I had in front of my eyes was real or not. I found it difficult to see in reality something I had seen thousand times in schoolbooks, films, magazines. The same thing happened when I first went to Rome, to India and to New York. Those places are such full of history, references and phantasms, that when you go there for real it kind of messes up things in your brain. You’re suddenly confronting the reality of the imagery you have already formed in your mind.
I learned later, that this could be seen as a kind of Stendhal Syndrome and that it was, for example, happening a lot to Japanese people coming to Paris or Florence. Thinking about it, it seems like any kind of travelling involves this reaction at different type levels, depending on how important and heavy the cultural references of the visited destinations are.
“I found it difficult to see in reality something I had seen thousand times in schoolbooks, films and magazines.”
POL: Taken together your work seems to question the notion of truth in a globalised world, alongside challenging preconceptions of foreign cultures. Do you think your work can be considered political?
FP: As long as your work is seen by someone, it tells them something, and therefore it becomes political. I’m not a very militant person though, but if people that see my pictures and then interrogate themselves about something that seems weird in this globalised world, I’m happy. When I produce work, I’m trying to do it with as much objectively as possible though.
POL: Your photography has taken you all over the world - have you had a favourite location you’ve visited and photographed?
FP: As said before, I think any location has interest, whether it is on the other side of the planet, or round the corner from your home, it’s a matter of putting yourself in “curiosity mode”. I will admit, it’s easier to get curious on the other side of the planet over something close to your residential location though.
As I’m preparing my projects quite precisely, I’m always very excited to be confronted by the real places I’ve done so much research on. It always give a strange feeling, as if I’m confronting the image I had formed in my mind against the real state of the place. When I’m travelling for projects, I also give myself space for more spontaneous images. This means I can take pictures from locations that I discover randomly, which gives me a very satisfying “it’s the best picture I’ve ever taken" feeling. So I can’t say if I have a favourite location, you can create work you love anywhere.
“I’m always very excited to be confronted by the real places I’ve done so much research on. It always give a strange feeling, as if I’m confronting the image I had formed in my mind against the real state of the place.”
POL: If money and time where no object, is there somewhere in the world you’d love to visit and document?
FP: Well, money, context and time are always the conditions on projects. As a creative it is my responsibility to find ideas and projects that fit in with this reality. It is part of the process. If you don’t have the connection and the money, find your way, there’s many ways, and that’s what makes projects exciting and interesting. I’m not rich, I had no prior connections in the business, but I had an obsession for it. I think that drives everything for me, and I think that’s the most important thing. Even if people think what you do is good or not, even if you get work or not, you better do something and try your best to produce something.
If you really want to achieve a project, I believe there’s always a way to do it. For example, I never thought I would spend the money I spent last year for a one month USA road-trip, but I found a way to finance it by working hard on other project.
POL: What are you working on now? What’s next?
FP: I worked on some assignments over the few last weeks which have kept me busy since the middle of August. Now that’s cooled down, I’m going to Spain next week for one week to document some night club and strip club facades.
I’m also working on a new book about my Gentlemen’s Club project. I’ve already made the layout and the book is ready to be launched to the printer, I’m looking for a publisher that will help for distribution and promotion.
About François Prost
François Prost, b.1980 in Lyon France, graduated from Brussels based Saint-Luc School in 2003 (graphic design and typography department). In 2004, he joined Fabrica, Benetton’s communication research centre based in Treviso, Italy, as part of an international thinktank dedicated to creativity, where he learned, experimented and worked among a top international creative community. Moving back to France in 2006, he worked full time as a graphic designer in Paris.
Over the past few years, he has been developing an independent photographer, focusing on building up strong and consistent series of works influenced by his interest in semiotics and community memory and experience. His 2015, project After Party received the “Fidal youth photography award” and was published as Prost’s first monograph by Headbanger Publishing, 2018.