Paul Bulteel. Figurants

Belgian photographer Paul Bulteel shares with us his study called “Figurants”, images that discuss the relationship between built space and human being.

Are we figurants or users when we engage with architecture - whether these are buildings or urban spaces? 
A question that Paul Bulteel, long-time traveller with an engineering background, asked himself as he walked his way across cities throughout the world. He claims that: “walking is the best way to capture the mood of the people around us, to breathe in the atmospheres of individual places and to capture those magical moments where the person or people portrayed are positioned in a particular context.”
Real images grabbed live, without artificial posing by the subjects, many of whom are unaware of the part they play on the big stage of the built environment, the one shaped by others for us. This is the essence of the “Figurants” series - how we fit in and more importantly how we act in an artificial world, which forms the backdrop to our existence.
Paul Bulteel delivers singular photographs, shots that show his awareness of the routine realities of places. Photos that act as an opening to the stories that go with them: the woman in the underground station greeting someone on the escalator, the man and child in the playroom, tourists gathered around a flower stall in front of a grey wall. Or are they all scenes from theatre shows of the absurd?
Not surprisingly, when you carefully study “Figurants” you feel slightly off-balance, because you are not only confronted with architecture in itself, but with your own relationship with it. So you start to realise how everything really should be active engagement with our built environment, whereas we often only see it as a deafening monologue of buildings, whether or not they are beautiful in themselves, making us indifferent to the role that binds us as figurants.  Paul Bulteel narrates the story of a landscape shaped by people for other people, but where the human figure is passive, despite the latest buzzwords like participation and sharing. Actually, with the respect and delicacy that stand out in this photographer's artworks, he confirms the importance of the studies of US architect and urban planner Kevin Lynch on the environmental image and the perception of the urban space. 
In creating his photos, Paul Bulteel therefore injects that empathy into the people and the built environment that we would also like to feel from the designers of these spaces.

Christiane Bürklein (@chrisbuerklein)

Paul Bulteel www.paulbulteel.eu