Romain Laprade

Romain Laprade, French, b. 1989

Laprade is a contemporary French photographer whose work elevates the subtle, often overlooked details of mid-century modernist architecture and urban landscapes. Beginning his career as a graphic designer for Vogue Paris and Holiday magazine, Laprade transitioned to photography with an acute eye for the structural anomalies and quiet poetry of the built environment. He frequently focuses his lens on specific eras of design, particularly the post-war period spanning the 1960s to the 1980s. By isolating mundane elements of daily life such as residential building foyers, muted storefronts, or geometric shadows, he transforms them into objects of profound nostalgic fascination.  

Laprade’s aesthetic is defined by a precise, structured approach to framing combined with a deeply cinematic, sun-drenched color palette. He excels at cropping out the noise of the broader city to focus entirely on textural interplay: the warmth of light hitting terrazzo flooring, the gleam of a brass door handle, or the rigid lines of a concrete staircase. His compositions rely on absolute formal clarity, yet they never feel clinical. Instead, his deliberate use of natural light, often evoking the atmospheric warmth of the South of France or the cinematic stillness of a 1970s film, softens the hard edges of modernism. By stripping away human presence, he allows the structural geometry and atmospheric lighting to communicate a quiet, resonant melancholy.  

For the Bushwick Sur Seine collection, Laprade represents a contemporary evolution of architectural and formalist photography, shifting the focus towards vernacular European mid-century interiors and architecture. While the original New Topographics photographers documented the man-altered landscape with a stark, deadpan objectivity, Laprade applies a similarly rigorous formal taxonomy to European mid-century spaces, injecting them with atmospheric warmth rather than cold detachment.

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