Franck Bohbot

Franck Bohbot is a visual artist, Self-Taught french photographer and filmmaker based in New York City.

He is a documentarian with an eye for the theatrical who found his way to photography by way of cinema, and although he turned his focus fully to photography in 2008, the formal and aesthetic influences of the cinematographic form continue to underlie his present work.

Bohbot’s work inhabits a space between reality and fantasy, documenting and storytelling, every frame – to borrow a phrase from Nan Goldin – like a still from a nonexistent film.

He has drawn artistic inspiration from figures as diverse as Jeff Wall, Stanley Kubrick, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Edward Hopper, Luigi Ghirri, William Eggleston, and Martin Scorsese.

Bohbot frequently takes a formal, typological approach to crafting visual narratives, highlighting the surreal symmetries of our constructed worlds and capturing the poetry of everyday places with a unique attentiveness to the interplay of light and color. He employs the latter two elements as tools of nostalgia, exploring loss and obsolescence by crafting images that are as much about what is invisible or lacking as what is there within the frame. Rendering public spaces, street scenes, and architectural sites of interest in his distinctive muted palette, he documents inanimate structures with all the sensitivity of a human portrait, as though constructing an imaginary archive of social spaces for a post-apocalyptic time capsule.