Untitled, New York Series 15, 2023

Luca Battaglia  

The portrait of places

Luca Battaglia is an Italian architect and photographer born in 1970 who lives and works in Paris, France. Luca met the Italian photographer Gabriele Basilico in Milan when he was preparing to become an architect. 

At the end of a conference, a personal exchange with the man who never ceased to describe the modern city sharpened Battaglia's eye. Until the photographer's death in 2013, the two men would regularly cross paths on projects where they would obviously document architecture in a different way. Luca Battaglia is now an established architect. With a wealth of experience at Yves Lion and Renzo Piano, he has been one of the founding partners of the Fresh Architectures agency since 2007. However, he has never "hung up" the camera that has accompanied him since his adolescence, driven by a need to express his architectural practice in a different way. 

The architect straightens and folds his project drawings to make them tangible. So, whenever he can, Battaglia surveys the city in search of these folds that give life to these façades, whose juxtaposition composes a framework as much as an urban texture. From New York to Paris, from London to Berlin, the architect-photographer tracks down the framing that, once the image is revealed, plays with the perception of reality. 

Also, no human presence or even the ground is ever shown, as Battaglia prefers to tend towards a certain abstraction of the representation. He often questions an imaginary fold as the shots underline the almost perfect symmetry of the chosen buildings. Like a human face that is embellished by its slight imperfections, these apparently perfect architectures become even morremarkable if a few details disturb their absolute axiality: the Grand Palais in Paris, the Duomo and La Scala in Milan, the Ground Zero underground station in New York... 

The architectures here are very identifiable and the image becomes even more striking. Perhaps everyone has already been to these places without even realizing the imaginary fold that the architect has sought to emphasize. Here again, the search for an ideal point of view is all that is needed to bring out the magic of the drawing.