“On the riverside” is a visual research aiming at investigating the different forms of relations between natural and man- made elements along the river Thames.
Mostly focused on the shifting landscape from inner to outer London, this photographic series attempts to highlight the crucial borderline between the fast urban changes that characterise the metropolis and the permanence of rural sceneries and local activities connected to the riverside life. Apparently, once out of the centre, West and East, always seen as two clearly different souls of the city, dissolve into almost indistinguishable landscapes.
The “long, winding, domesticated snake” – as quoted by the British author and photographer Eric De Maré – has here been elected as a symbolic point of view to depict the transformation of the built environment, playing its role as natural threshold and border but also a longitudinal connection between multiple scenarios.
Lorenzo Zandri is a photographer and artist currently based between London and Paris.
Trained as an architect between Rome and Paris, he started to dedicate himself completely to photography and the process of the image in architecture, deciding to not build things but images.
The image is a crucial result of an artistically-led process, swinging its position between documenting the
built environment but also illustrating a meaning through the image itself. His fine approach aims at narrating spaces and atmospheres recalling different past references and analogies from the archive of paintings and art images related to our culture.
In 2019 his visual research ‘On the riverside’ has been exhibited for the London Festival of Architecture in London and published in different platforms and books. His work has been also displayed in Praha for ‘Behind Camera’, an international exhibition curated by Adam Stěch with Leonardo Finotti among others.
In 2020, he has been invited to talk about his practice to the ZoomedIN Festival, an architectural photography festival with some great awarded photographers as Hélène Binet, Adam Mørk, Dennis Gilbert.
He collaborates with different practices and architectural firms worldwide spreading their projects through his lens. His images have frequently published on architectural and design magazines (DOMUS, AD, Dezeen, designboom, etc).
He co-founded ROBOCOOP, an experimental and research art
duo project, creating ephemeral architectural scenarios and urban collages related the past and historical sources.
© text and pictures by Lorenzo Zandri
