02 may 2025, Flor Linckens
Romain Jacquet-Lagrèze: far above street level
In the exhibition 'Echoing Above' at Blue Lotus Gallery in Hong Kong, photographer Romain Jacquet-Lagrèze invites us to look up. Far above street level, a world unfolds that often escapes our attention: trees growing on building façades and men who, with astonishing skill, fasten bamboo poles together to create scaffolding and frameworks for renovations high above the city.
With the series "Echoing Above", the French photographer pays tribute to the vanishing craft of bamboo scaffolding, known locally as "Fei Paang" (飛棚), which translates to "flying scaffold". This technique, secured with minimal anchoring, demands not only an exceptional sense of balance and coordination but also a precise understanding of the physical forces at play. At the same time, the photographer celebrates the ingenuity and resilience of both people and nature within an ever-warming concrete jungle in one of the most densely populated cities on earth.
For "Echoing Above", Jacquet-Lagrèze spent three years capturing three elements that play out above the city’s streets: trees forcing their way through concrete walls, men erecting bamboo structures at dizzying heights, and birds flying freely between buildings — from cockatoos to blue-capped cordon-bleus. His focus lies on the city’s vertical layers, the persistence of nature in inhospitable environments, and the evolving relationship between people and their urban surroundings.
Born in Paris in 1987, the photographer studied multimedia and fine arts at the University of East Paris and spent time in Los Angeles and Tokyo before permanently relocating to Hong Kong in 2009 at the age of 22. His fascination with the city’s visual complexity has only grown since. What began as an attempt to send his mother a photo book of his new surroundings, developed into a body of work that has drawn international acclaim. His work has been exhibited in Hong Kong, Singapore, Shanghai, Amsterdam and Paris, and has appeared in publications including National Geographic, The Guardian, CNN, El País, Huffington Post, Lonely Planet, Le Figaro Magazine, Die Welt, Bloomberg and South China Morning Post.
Jacquet-Lagrèze’s approach is both intuitive and meticulous: he roams the city, attuned to the rhythm of construction, studies the weather and returns to the same location multiple times until the light is just right. It is a slow, attentive process where technical precision meets a poetic sensitivity to the everyday. In doing so, he captures moments that we often miss.
The series also serves as a form of documentation. The Hong Kong government recently announced plans to potentially ban bamboo scaffolding in the future, at least in part. These lightweight, flexible and sustainable structures, a familiar feature of the urban landscape for decades, risk being replaced by metal scaffolds — an expression of standardisation and risk management. Jacquet-Lagrèze, who expresses deep respect for the craftsmen (often referred to as "spiders") who balance these airy frameworks, alludes to the decision on his Instagram account as a step backwards. At a time when cities are grappling with urban heat island effect (where temperatures in urban areas rise significantly above those in surrounding rural zones) the abandonment of a breathable, renewable and heat-resistant material seems symptomatic of a broader disregard for traditional building techniques and cultural heritage. It calls to mind the widespread embrace of Western modernist architecture in hot, non-Western regions. Skyscrapers dominate the skyline but are thermally inefficient. Yet they continue to be favoured over climate-smart structures developed over centuries in places like the Middle East and West Africa — ventilated designs adapted to natural airflow. Rather than embracing this time-tested knowledge, the urban world seems to increasingly drift away from what truly works. In that way, Jacquet-Lagrèze’s work becomes an invitation to redefine our understanding of progress.
The three chapters that make up "Echoing Above" (Trees, Men and Birds) also form the basis of a new photo book of the same name, launched alongside the exhibition. In eighty images, the photographer composes an urban symphony where nature, humanity and architecture remain in balance, both literally and metaphorically.
With earlier series such as "Vertical Horizon", "Wild Concrete", "City Poetry", "The Blue Moment" and "Concrete Stories," Jacquet-Lagrèze has established himself as a photographer of the invisible city: forgotten plants, fleeting twilight, the quiet poetry of street signs and human presence on rooftops and in in-between spaces. "Echoing Above" continues in that tradition but adds a new dimension. The series becomes a call to preserve urban diversity.
