What you’re about to see is a series of photographs of Star Wars characters and ships placed in a real Earth world. There has been a bit of confusion over these photos in the past, especially since they’re so hype-worthy and easily spread without accreditation. There are approximately 3 releases of these photos, each with a few new images added. The first came in 2005, the next sometime before 2007, and now the newest one in 2010. It’s a fascinating set of photos in which after the shock and awe of realizing that that’s a Jawa I see stealing my speeder parts, there comes a sense of fascination, a real new sense of “it’s all true, isn’t it?”
Master advertisement photographer Cédric Delsaux has been working on this series for some time now, having started out clicking droids, Jedi, and spaceshipmobiles without any intent of stopping all those years (5) ago. But now the completion has come! Having taken his final of three sets in Dubai, now dubbing the entire series Dark Lens, Delsaux reports that the circle is now complete.
The first set of photos (2005) is all in France, in the suburbs of Paris. In this series you’ll mostly see a single character standing in amongst daily life, pretty much just working on the oddity of the situation. This set of photos called “Star Wars on Earth” and won the Kodak prize for landscapes and architecture that year.
The second series which was photographed between 2005 and 2007 was taken in Lille, France, and also went under the name “Star Wars on Earth.” This series was displayed with a set of landscape portraits at Project4Gallery in Washington DC from September 15 – October 20, 2007. In it were 10 new photos plus a few from the first set.
This newest (and final?) installment’s images were just released within the past week (it’s 2/24/2010 when I write this), but there was a show displaying them in a gallery – The Empty Quarter Fine Art Photography Gallery from December 8th-31st in 2009. This is the “Dark Lens” series and it’s all photographed in Dubai. This set is where the subject matter sort of changes. In these Dubai photos, Delsaux revels in the new world we live in, saying how wild it is to live in a world where science fiction pales in comparison. Delsaux mentions in an interview on Amusement Magazine that in the same way the epic Science Fiction / Futurism film Blade Runner reflected the state of Los Angeles, so too does Dark Lens reflect Dubai, which in turn represents the dreamy, magical, industrialismic world of modern architecture.
The way Cédric Delsaux created these lovely amalgamations was to photograph a location first, then to set up action figures and models to be placed, finishing by combining the two with some fabulous computer magic. Not too difficult, yes?
Gallery Organization:
1-16 are photographed in the suburbs of Paris and is called “Star Wars on Earth”
17-28 are photograped in Lille, France and is also part of the extended SWoE set
29 on are from the Dubai set
Each of these images exist also in print form, generally a C-Print 27 inches wide. What a magnificent site they must be to behold, so says I.