Emmanuel Monzon is a French photographer and plastic artist living in Seattle. He has exhibited his works mainly in France, Singapore, USA, China, and has also participated in several arts fairs and collective exhibitions. He graduated from the Beaux Arts in Paris, with honors (Vladimir Velikovick), and also holds a degree in Visual Arts.
The work of Emmanuel Monzon focuses primarily on the idea of urban sprawling and the urban expansion of its periphery. Monzon photographs urban banality as though it were a Romantic painting, trying only to be “stronger than this big nothing” in controlling the space by framing the subject. Monzon’s aesthetic of the banal obeys its own rules: a ban on living objects, a precise geometrical organization, and the revelation of a specific physical and mental landscape blurring the lines between city and suburb, between suburb and countryside, a process that results in an independent identity.
This aesthetic of the emptiness in my photographic work attempts to understand our current environment: Can it be one of de-civilization?