SV Artist Takeover: Serge Najjar

https://vimeo.com/193769501

StandardVision follows up Phillip Heer’s artist takeover on our SVLA1 screen on the Marriott Courtyard Hotel in Downtown Los Angeles with work by Serge Najjar. Najjar is the latest artist to be invited to take over a week-long recurring 15-second spot to showcase their work to the public.

Najjar, aka Serjios is a Lebanese photographer who focuses on urban architecture. His work plays with shadow, line, and geometric pattern. Serjios often includes pedestrian figures within his compositions in order to demonstrate scale, or to play with shadow and create a sense of magical realism. Color and shape are heavily emphasized, and many of his photos appear to show two-dimensional rather than three, where a lone figure serves as the only break to the illusion. Serjios’ photography is easily categorized as minimalist but many pieces also appear surreal or collage-like and are often examples of optical illusions captured in everyday settings.

Serjios seems to find pedestrians in the most impossible circumstances, but when it doesn’t happen naturally, he starts a conversation with a passerby in order to capture the shot according to his own vision. His eye is extraordinary, yet his technique deceptively simple when explained: “I use the iPhone 4 and mainly the Photoshop app to adjust the exposure or contrast of my shots, and I tend not to use filters a lot because I like my pictures to keep their original properties.”Beirut is known for its Mediterranean style of architecture, yet Serjios seems to capture its more modern, bare, and minimal edifices. Instagram helped Najjar to view Beirut in a different light; it helped him to find beauty in the seemingly mundane, overlooked, aspects of daily life. “After all, our everyday life is not as boring as we think it is.”

Take a look at more of his work and an interview here, and browse his instagram @serjios