For Photographic Mission: Transgenic Landscape, photographers were challenged to interpret the Guimarães area of northern Portugal through the cultural and architectural use of its landscapes, particularly in the light of a polarisation between city and rural populations.

Such an assignment is perfectly suited to the Ghent-based Dujardin, whose website chronicles his affection for buildings and other man-made structures. In the series Chimneys, he went from apartment to apartment in an abandoned building in Ghent that was scheduled for demolition. “Originally they all had the same layout and concept, but over the years, inhabitants customised the rooms to their own tastes, including the chimneys. You could read the personality of the residents by looking at part of the interior.”

For the series Sheds, Dujardin travelled the Flemish countryside in search of self-made structures, or “architecture not built by architects”. These sheds, constructed with leftover materials by farmers, felt honest and familiar. Dujardin, 40, likens his work in photography to farmers putting up sheds in their fields. “It’s intuitive. I’m making designs without a preconceived plan.” As an architectural photographer, he says, “you have to reproduce, in some ways, the work of others. That means that the subject can come across as less interesting or the context very confining, so I want to redefine those concerns with digital series. It was very interesting to me that I could really make my own images, altering the light, shadow, form. That’s where I began to explore the sculptural elements of architecture.”

His best-known series, Fictions, takes familiar buildings and adds surreal elements until it is difficult to perceive what is real and what is not. “That thin line between making hyper-realist and science fiction photos is where I want to work,” he explains. “I’m looking for the balance in reality and abstract – too real to be fictional, too abstract to be real.”

He employed this same method for the Photographic Mission project in Guimarães. Once a centre of textile production, the city and surrounding areas are peppered with abandoned industrial complexes, says Dujardin, “witnesses of a disappearing economy that changed the landscape dramatically.”

He went to Portugal twice to take photographs for the exhibition. “Big infrastructural works developed in the 1980s there – such as toll highways that cross the landscape on viaducts – were supposed to encourage economic activities, but they changed local communication between the villages drastically and are a visually dominant feature in the landscape. These aspects, together with the local architectural heritage of building with stone and my fascination with the natural phenomenon of the rocky landscapes, were an inspiration for this series.”

The results are wholly new architectures that still seem to fit into the landscape. “All the images are digitally manipulated to a greater or lesser extent,” explains Dujardin. “Some of them are even conceived from scratch. I designed a structure with 3D software and could digitally stick on parts of photos. I took pictures of all kinds of walls, windows, factories, stone rocks and so on. Then I mixed them together and poured it into a new condensed hyper-reality.”

www.filipdujardin.be