Picture show’s debut exhibition Cities are Like Oceans by Paris based photographer Cyrus Cornut will open on Tuesday 2 March at Wolfe Lane as one of the 90+ photography exhibitions of the FotoFreo 2010 Fringe Festival.

Cities are Like Oceans explores the place of human beings in cities that are increasingly chaotic and where modernity takes over traditions that have been established over time. Man as a social being no longer has a place here. Human scale has been reduced to nothing. Man, with an individualistic future is lost like a drop in the urban ocean. Houses crumble, skyscrapers grow, the ground is filled with urban communication networks. The world marches on. Cyrus is guided by the feeling that links the individual to everything else. The light is that of dawn or dusk, of neon or storms, to dramatise the
seemingly unavoidable evolution.

Cyrus Cornut came to photography through travel.

‘It allows you to escape a vision : that of the sterile repetition of places, people and of yourself’ Franck Michel.

Having dreamt of the great tropical forests of the world, he began travelling in cities. This attraction for urban jungles comes from his personal rapport with them. Cyrus discovers the city, walking ceaselessly, finding his way by cutting the territory up into personal land marks : the traces links, empty spaces, junctions, edges, heights, complex places… It is wandering, an urban vision without the pretension of being objective, just an extension of his architect’s eye.

French of Iraqi-Iranian descent, Cyrus Cornut was born in 1977. His first trip was in his crib due to his family’s expatriation. He first lived in Baghdad, then Cairo and finally Paris. Having studied architecture at university, today he is a professional photographer. His work revolves around the city, its evolution, framework, traces, empty spaces and the human behaviour that it leads to. In 2006, his work on Chinese megacities was shown at the Rencontres Internationales de la photographie in Arles under Raymond Depardon’s art direction. He joined the photography collective Dolce Vita in the same year, and became a member of the Picturetank photography cooperative in 2007.

Cities are Like Oceans will run from Tuesday March 2 – Tuesday April 13 as part of the FotoFreo 2010 Fringe Festival.