Lian LeBlanc is a student and photographer hailing from Freeport, Bahamas. Her project, ‘The City of Blinding Lights’, focuses on how the glamour of the city conceals the negative effects it has on the natural world. The central concept is that the sensory saturation of urban life leaves its inhabitants incapable of seeing the bigger picture, in particular the environmental damage caused by such a lifestyle. Her series pertains to themes of blindness, excess, oblivion, corruption, and the danger of outer appearances. Lian’s photography is a much-needed wake up call to the reality that the way people live in cities is shockingly unsustainable, and that the very lushness of urban life is what permits us to remain so unaware of this fact.
The humans are styled after buildings to create the scene of a city whilst simultaneously representing themselves as urban dwellers. The photography above has an industrial quality that is reminiscent of a factory bellowing smoke into a bleak darkness.
The smoking models symbolize the literal pollution caused by modern consumerism, but also the pollution of ourselves. The theme of self-corruption has a twofold aspect in Lian’s photography: it alludes to the degradation of our physical bodies that results from a sedentary urban lifestyle, but also the moral decay of excess.
The glitter is a symbol for the spellbinding charm of the city, and how easily one can get drawn in by its superficial allure. The insensibility to everything else that results from this literal and figurative ‘blinding’, a loss of sight caused by an excess of light, is a critical theme in Lian’s work.
PHOTOGRAPHY BY LIAN LEBLANC
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