Long Island City Buildings by Franck Bohbot

Long Island City Buildings, New York, 2018 30” x 40”, Edition of 5 C-Type Print

'Long Island City Buildings' works well in a darker, homely room, with the landscape mixing with the very naturalistic lighting to achieve an urban feel but in no way harsh or inhuman.

Looking at Franck Bohbot's 'Long Island City Buildings', the image seems to glow of the page with the combined use of the natural sunset, the fluorescent lights of the background buildings, the dock lights, and their reflections in the water, this image imbues so much spirit into the cityscape. The composition works well to draw the eye to the words 'Long Island', standing out as a dark metal structure amongst the dazzling lights.

About the Artist:

Franck Bohbot is an artist specializing in photography and film. Born in the southernmost suburbs of Paris, France, Franck Bohbot moved to New York City in 2013 and is currently based in Los Angeles since 2019. He is a documentarian with an eye for the theatrical who found his way to photography by way of cinema, and although he turned his focus fully to photography in 2008, the formal and aesthetic influences of the cinematographic form continue to underlie his present work. Bohbot’s work inhabits a space between reality and fantasy, documenting and storytelling, every frame – to borrow a phrase from Nan Goldin – like a still from a nonexistent film. He has drawn artistic inspiration from figures as diverse as Jeff Wall, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Edward Hopper, Luigi Ghirri, and Martin Scorsese. Bohbot frequently takes a formal, typological approach to craft visual narratives, highlighting the surreal symmetries of our constructed worlds and capturing the poetry of everyday places with a unique attentiveness to the interplay of light and color. He employs the latter two elements as tools of nostalgia, exploring loss and obsolescence by crafting images that are as much about what is invisible or lacking as what is there within the frame. Rendering public spaces, street scenes, and architectural sites of interest in his distinctive muted palette, he documents inanimate structures with all the sensitivity of a human portrait, as though constructing an imaginary archive of social spaces for a post-apocalyptic time capsule. His work has received widespread critical acclaim and has appeared in a range of national publications including  TIME, National Geographic, The New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, Wired, New York Magazine, The Financial Times, The Independent, Les Inrockuptibles, Marie Claire,  Elle, or Corriere Della Sera, Vogue