United Kingdom • Born in 1985

Urbex (or when nature reclaims its rights)

When British photographer Gina Soden enters an abandoned place, it’s always the silence that strikes her first. Then come the cracked walls, broken windows, peeling paint, dusty furniture, and weeds growing wild and unchecked... Rather than fleeing the desolation of these places that everyone seems to have abandoned, Gina Soden makes them her kingdom and canvas for artistic expression. In it, she sees an aesthetic richness and a memory chiselled away by time. The photographer scours Europe in search of haunted castles, dilapidated hospitals, disused factories and abandoned manor houses. Without ever revealing their location, she revisits them in photographic form.

Her approach is not documentary in style. Instead, she prefers to experiment with the composition of these places to bring them back to life almost artificially. Each image reveals a truly painterly aesthetic. But unlike other so-called «urbex» or « urban exploration » photographers, her work is never gloomy or anxietyprovoking. Exhibited in London and Paris galleries, her work prompts us to reflect on the idea of heritage and our relationship with history and obsolescence, whether planned or otherwise.

In an age obsessed with the beautiful, the new, the perfect and the smooth, Gina Soden reflects on decay, decomposition, deterioration and, ultimately, the underlying idea of death – or disappearance, at least. This philosophy and approach have enabled Gina Soden to rescue dying architecture from oblivion, albeit for the briefest of moments. These are places that bear witness to a past that is not fading as quickly as progress is marching on. Her images often show that the end of one thing is always the beginning of another. This poetic quality of transforming abandonment into renaissance is the secret to this London photographer’s success.

RUE SAINT-VINCENT

Gina Soden