A Building's Life

Iconic buildings and dramatic landscapes are his motives. Frederic Chaubin, photographer and chief editor of the French magazine Citizen K, is searching for places, that have a story to tell and whose unique character he can document with his camera. On his various travels to the former Soviet Union, India, Norway, Cambodia – where he was born – and several other countries, he created series of pictures that were shown in various exhibitions. Today they are already important contemporary documents, since some of his architectural motives already vanished.

Interview (nur in englisch)
Frederic, you are the chief editor of the magazine Citizen K. for many years now. What made you pick up the camera?

The first time I met the people, who would later be involved in Citizen K, it was to show them a photographic work. I had written a text to explain this work, which brought their attention. Without considering the pictures, they invited me to write for the magazine. After a short time I turned to be the editor in chief. It took me about 5 years before succeeding in publishing pictures in Citizen K. Very rarely people will admit that you may have visual skills as well as literary ones. My main asset, I believe, is to have both abilities.

When taking pictures, you focus on architecture. What is so special about photographing architectural objects?

I don’t make a difference. I just think that a picture should bring you to a story. In that way I’m very far from the architecture photographers that believe in the possibility of an objective picture. I only believe, personally, in subjectivity. My photographs always include a foreground or a background to contextualise. They are meant to bring you into the frame like a movie set does. Furthermore, a building has also its biological life. It’s not only related to space, but also to time. It travels through seasons and years, offering a changing face. This dimension brings back the main topic of photography, which is disappearance.

How did you get the idea to photograph former Soviet architecture?

I just took pictures of very unusual buildings without knowing where it would bring me. It took me some time to understand, that this was a subject. As I was travelling though former Soviet Union Republics, the process of finding those orphan and unknown monsters turned into some kind of game. A game I was used to. When I was 25 years old, I worked as a scout for the movie business, looking for natural sets.

This architecture seems futuristic and is partly very innovative. What made such a trend appear in a country like the USSR?

The answer can only be speculative. First of all, because it’s difficult to figure out exactly what were the influences and how much the local architects knew about the rest of the world. Also, because no one is working on this period and very few traces of the process remain visible today despite the buildings themselves. The question is to figure out if this unexpected creativity had been supported by the regime in the open mindedness of the Perestroika or if it was the result of some daring architects taking advantage of a collapsing system and its weakness. At that point there is no clear answer. USSR was a huge political and geographical area encompassing very contradictory realities.


Were those architects famous? What are they doing today?

Those architects had been taught in the same mould, going through the same institutions. They could only work for local or state administrations. At the same time, in some specific fields – basically for leisure, cultural or administrative buildings – they were probably expected to be creative. Some of them gained local fame, even if the collectivist ideology didn’t really leave much place for stardom – In any case, this has nothing to do with our western understanding of notoriety. But they probably remained anonymous out of their specific field of action. Right now, their position is even worse, as this period goes through some kind of purgatory. There isn’t much interest or consideration for it because of the ideological suspicion related to it. The ones that are still alive are now retired.

If you look at the recent architectural development in Dubai, the boom of modern architecture, what do you think of this?

The very broad vision we have of it is precisely related to the present stardom of architects. It turns architecture into some kind of dramatic competition, a challenge that brings the best and, unfortunately, the worst.


Whose architecture/What project would you like to take pictures of?

The subjects are usually brought by the circumstances. I just take the most disorienting directions. I created in the magazine my own “scouting column”, in which I quiet often publish my own work: text and pictures of stories related to a forgotten architectural style or a remote area. It may be Gipsy palaces in Romania as well as ruins of a seaside resort in Cambodia. Behind each there is always an enigma. I love the idea of bringing back flesh to the bones.

Where can the Soviet pictures be seen next?

A selection of them will be shown this summer in Portugal in the Utopia collective exhibition curated by Paul Wombell and related to the PhotoEspana event. And they will be shown at the Chicago Architecture Foundation from July 10 to October 3.

Thanks for the interview