Polystyrène

About the Photographer

Joye, Florian

Swiss, b. 1979

The work of Florian Joye reacts to unrestrained development and touches on the idea of the future or “auto” monument. Joye’s photographs record signage and advertisements for planned developments in the Middle East, often created as assemblages of imagery of iconic buildings. Mostly shot at close range, Joye focuses more on the iconography of capitalism than the sweeping views of mushrooming cities that have become typical of the region. Other images depict recent state-of-the-art architecture juxtaposed with older infrastructure such as the Burj Khalifa skyscraper in Dubai set in the background of a field of power line towers. In this work Joye effectively hints at our need to hyper-memorialize and to build structures that, while poised to be iconic, ultimately compete for attention more than they signify or remind.