Written by Margherita Visentini

Miami Houses is an essential and clean project by the Paris-based photographer Leo Caillard, a comparative study of the South Miami Beach’s lifeguard houses, where each photo follows the same layout: the lifeguard house placed in the center of the frame, in a real or apparent isolated moment, “standing in front of this immutable horizon line and the calm sea as a background”, like Leo Caillars statement underlines.

In 1992 hurricane Andrew swept most of the South Beach lifeguard houses away and they were rebuilt, with bright colors and eccentric decorations, typical of South Beach. So they became a quite favourite subjects for photographers but what this project is aiming to do is representing and transforming something real in something pictorial through a frontal point of view.

House after house, “the perspective is flattened to keep only the pictorial essence: form and color. Thus, each image individually may seem trivial or ordinary, but their strength lies in the multiplicity of images of the same type.”