BUILDING 2015
Through its title, the “Building” series refers directly to those ambitious, not to say arrogant, architectural structures found in our great metropolitan cities and financial capitals, structures containing mostly offices that are empty at night, when the employees who work there go home to their families, to eat and to sleep. This series of photographs is composed of shots of plastic milk crates in different colors, the kind used in markets and supermarkets and that are often thrown away after use, sometimes with some of their contents still inside them. We have all witnessed economically fragile homeless people with no other resources rummaging through them, searching desperately for something to eat. By exaggeratingly accentuating the shadows of these crates, Paolo Topy’s goal was to evoke the dreams of those people, who he sees every day. Their dreams become obsessions: having a house of one’s own, a home. The shadows are like illusions. Evasive, fleeting, they express how hard it can be in today’s world to access even the most elementary human rights: a roof over one’s head, food to eat. Dark and disturbing, they express the growing gap in our society between the cynicism and indifference of some and the fragility of others. Those “others” who sometimes seek refuge at the foot of the very skyscrapers that parade proudly hundreds of meters above their heads.
Yves Peltier