Roman Jehanno’s Latence II Captures the Stillness of Life

Last Updated on 10/16/2014 by Kevin Lee

All images by Roman Jehanno. Used with permission.

Photography is all about capturing a moment whether it’s action, comedy, despair, or any moment in life. Roman Jehanno, on the other hand, is in search of that perfect moment of stillness with his Latence II photo series. In each frame there’s a character standing beside themselves with a bleak skyline overhead and desolate backdrop behind them.

Roman says he was originally in search of the image walking around the suburbs of Paris. Night after night he would look for this moment where he was the only one left in the city. “One night I stopped myself on a crossroad and just froze in the perfect silence of the night,” Roman, a Hasselblad Masters 2014 contest winner, says. “I think this is exactly the moment when I started to think about this work.”

“I wanted to picture these fictional characters exactly at the moment where they disappear,” Roman explains. “In their mind they are thinking about their past life, and how was the world before.”

It’s an interesting composition that leaves the viewer to wonder who are these characters and what are they thinking. To create the images Roman used his Canon 5D Mk II to shoot multi-frame images and edited them together to create big prints.

“Its a work about loneliness and that moment when you’re just by yourself,” Roman expounds. “I wanted the characters to be on the edge of something important in their introspection.”

Roman says his work has always been about telling stories in his pictures but now he wants to focus less on characters and show the person underneath. For the past year Roman has been working on a new project entitled “ 1 hour, 1 coffee, 1 click.” In this series Roman takes a single portrait with his medium format camera after I spend at least an hour talking with the model over coffee.

You can find more of Roman’s work on his website and Behance profile. Alternatively you can like him on Facebook or follow him on Twitter and Instagram.