What would a building look like without the actual building? This is the dystopian question posed by photographer Zacharie Gaudrillot-Roy in his ongoing series "Facades."
The photos, which have been simultaneously intriguing and freaking out the internet at an ever-quickening pace, imagine a world in which your first glimpse of an urban landscape is its reality. Buildings are reduced to purposeless slabs of matter, lined with windows leading nowhere.
The surreal images take a straightforward concept and show just how jarring the effects can be. The metropolitan buildings, stripped of all their stuff, are left as ambiguous props, resembling at once movie sets, canvases and even gravestones.
"The façade is the first thing we see, it’s the surface of a building," Gaudrillot-Roy said. "It can be impressive, superficial or safe. Just like during a wandering through a foreign city, I walk through the streets with these questions: What will happen if we stick to that first vision? [What] if the daily life of 'The Other' was only a scenery? This series thus offers a vision of an unknown world that would only be a picture, without intimate space, with looks as the only refuge."
Gaudrillot-Roy's meditation on superficial impressions also serves as a foreboding premonition for an appearance-driven future. As if you weren't already anxious enough, the eerie photographs can't help but conjure "The Truman Show"-esque thoughts like, "Is it all a dream?" or, "Are we living in the matrix?"
Now that we've sufficiently tripped you out, do your best to enjoy the works below.
