About

FAPA Award 2019-20 in Professional Category People

Born in France, Philippe Roguet lives and works in Lyon. His father’s works have instilled in him, from an early age, a great sensitivity for architecture design, in the 80’s, a period during which you could see proliferate urban propositions presenting extreme variety in shapes and styles.

After higher education in Design and Graphism in Lyon, he creates his own studio in the late 90’s. His first works refer to the Swiss graphic style, so called International style, for its simplicity and visual effectiveness. Then comes the period of trips in Africa and Asia. He makes his first shots in 2010, during a trip in Mongolia.

In 2014, his first exhibition ‘Nomades’ presents fifty photographs he took in Central Asia, between 2010 and 2014, including a series based on a photo report on the first nomadic equestrian games in Kyrgyzstan with riders from Kok Boru (Afghan Buzkashi), a distant ancestor of polo in a wilder version. Equivalent to our Olympic games in a nomadic environment, these games bring together all the Central Asia countries, with the desire to promote the history of nomadic nations, their traditions, their way of life and their culture.

Subsequently, his photographic works, centered on the urban landscape, make the link with his graphic design sobriety and imagination: the voids come to define the space, volumes and intervals in which the subject fits. The near typographical precision that one finds in his photographs retained the attention of architects who entrusted him with his first mandates of photo reports.

Concurrently with these orders, he experiments architectural photography in search of the atmosphere of the places, an architecture as a metaphor of the human condition. His decision to work with the photographic chamber implies a slower, less image-intensive process. The images of the ‘Convent of the Tourette d’Éveux’ part of the ‘Jour de neige’ series have this dreamlike load where the spaces become calm, obvious, of a sensual poetry.

In 2019, he engaged a personal photographic project on the large African trees disappearance due to climate change: the vast majority of the oldest baobabs in Africa are dying. The situation of these ancient trees has worsened over the last fifteen years. A disappearance that is qualified as having an unprecedented magnitude. These trees are symbolic in Africa where they are the link between the land and the people. Then, how to represent them with dignity and give them again the place that anthropocentrism had taken away from them?

The series ‘Tree of life’ presents the first images of a personal artistic documentation made with the photographic chamber along a journey of more than eight thousand kilometers in southern Africa.

« I take pictures, I make pictures …

In a world that surrenders to the demon of speed, which overwhelms us with images, movement, sounds, our last luxury is time, the one we take to stop and look at what surrounds us. If a photo is silent while you decide what it says, I believe a photographer is involved in his time, by reproducing what he sees, through his own idea of aesthetics, his intimate perception, but that he does not affirm or impose.»