[ˌindəˌvijo͞oˈalədē]

NOUN.

The quality or character of a particular person or thing that distinguishes them from others of the same kind.

Sneak peek at a long-term project, finally in the final stages, on individuality and the will to stand out, as well as the opposite side, conformity and the need to fit in.

My fascination for patterns, particularly in urban architecture, quite unexpectedly, looked like the perfect way to express that.

I've always loved to take pictures of the biggest, most uniform buildings I came upon, cropping out everything but the repetitive elements, then observing them closely and trying to find little unique details. Those distinct traits, big and small, bring interest on what are often, at first glance, boring façades.

Somehow, while spending countless hours staring at those pictures, completely mesmerized, I started reflecting on conformity and my own lifelong struggle with trying to fit in. That's how this strangely very personal project was born: the unlikely connection between deep feelings and introspection, and what is to many people the most boring architecture.

Of course, you can't have uniqueness without uniformity, and I realize that most people might simply enjoy (or dislike) these pictures for what they are visually: very repetitive patterns. That's perfectly fine with me !

It would of course possible to do it from scratch from any single window, but I always start with some kind of existing pattern, then crop, cut, copy/paste, repeat in different ways depending on each specific façade.

Space constraints sometimes make it difficult to get a good vantage point, and the only way to deal with very marked distortion is thus to reduce a pattern to its simplest form, which can then be repeated any number of times.

The question very quickly becomes: How many times should this pattern be repeated?

One thing is certain, there is absolutely no point in repeating it a thousand times on each axis, the resulting images containing a gazillion megapixels.

There's obviously no correct answer. Each picture is different and I usually try many combinations before finding one that looks good to me.

As you might already have noticed, beyond the repeated pattern itself, the only constant is that I deliberately break it in some way, but only in a single place. This project, after all, is about individuality and uniqueness...

Sometimes it's really obvious, sometimes less so, and my self-imposed "rule" is to always use some distinct element that was in the original picture.