It began in 2002, on a late-night drive home from Silicon Valley. A Stanford-trained software engineer surrounded by the noise of the tech boom by day, Roux pulled over one night, struck by the industrial landscape along his route — overpasses, warehouses, fog-laden streets — and set up his film camera. The long exposures revealed something unexpected: the city at night was not dark. It was luminous, geometric, and entirely his own.
What followed was three years of nocturnal exploration across San Francisco — Dogpatch, SoMa, Potrero Hill — and the forgotten industrial peripheries, and then, after leaving the Bay Area in 2005, across other cities. Now based in Paris, Roux has returned to that original landscape with two decades of distance and a fully developed visual language.
Nocturne Urbana is a body of large-format photographs with select works reaching 240 x 360 cm — documenting the interplay of artificial light, architecture, and urban space at night. Devoid of human figures, the images render Silicon Valley and San Francisco as something between monument and mirage: the infrastructure of the most consequential technological moment in history, stilled and rendered sublime.
Rooted formally in the traditions of Gursky's monumental scale and Kenna's long-exposure poetry, the work exists in its own register — unstaged, unmanipulated, entirely dependent on the night itself.