Metropolia (WILL BE SIGNED)

Martin Bogren
Metropolia (WILL BE SIGNED)

Photographs: Martin Bogren

Text: Anaël Pigeat

Publisher: Atelier EXB

96 pages

Year: 2022

Comments: Hardcover, 26 x 19.5 cm. B&W and colors photographs. French edition. Will be signed on November Thursday 10th. Reserve your signed copy now!

The newest publication from photographer Martin Bogren, including an interview conducted by Anaël Pigeat.

Although shot in New York City, this isn't a series about NYC but rather a reflection of life in any large urban center or metropolis. Bogren looks at the dynamic between togetherness and loneliness. From the publisher: In this urban wandering between dream and reality, Martin Bogren includes for the first time some color photographs that come punctuate the black and whites: The use of color was a way to be rebel against myself, as the photographer explains in the interview, to see if I could do something totally new. With black-and-white, I had begun to know a little too much about what I was doing, while color was like a foreign language that I learned slowly. But to tell you the truth, my color images are very monochromatic. Where are we? In a city filled with solitary presences, with facades that look like walls: it is about seeing beyond appearances, to go through the mirror, bring out of one’s depth to see differently. Each image is a vision, seized and in the meantime, it seems to dissolve before our eyes: we distinguish some crossings, some architectures, the metro station’s corridor, in the distance an island scattered with buildings. The wandering is also made of encounters, figures captured live, as appearances, sometimes with closed eyes, locked in their inside world, often taken in close-up. Grasping the inner self, conveying the fragile, allow to see the impermanence of things: Martin Bogren’s visual universe reveals the world’s illusion. His photographs catch a reality that slips away yet the photographer has managed to seize it in extremes, on the sly. Life is a dream and all reality is just illusion, to quote Pedro Calderon, and diving in this unreality remains a pleasure.