Branislav Kropilak currently lives and works in Bratislava. Born in Slovakia, he spent most of his childhood in Belgium, travelling a lot with his parents from an early age. Fascinated by industrial architecture, he was pleased to return to his native Slovakia so that he could photograph factories. “Many people don’t like them because they’re factories and they smell bad,” he says, “but I was always amazed by how they look – like out-of-space cities.” The 27-year-old is following in the footsteps of legendary German photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher, who documented blast furnaces, cooling towers and grain elevators around the world, treating them as rigorous architectural typologies. His images, however, don’t document the decadent charm of industrial archeology, nor the wear of man’s creations. In his shots appears a world free from the contamination of man, existing beyond and without him, a world of abstract forms and shapes. That sense of desolation pervades all of the photographer’s work, whether it’s garages, hotel lobbies or looking up the masts of highway billboard.
www.kropilak.com
