NOICE is a photography publication and community for photographers that have a meticulous eye for form, beauty, symmetry, novelty, and humour.
Name
Johannes Elebaut
Title ︎︎︎ The Biggest Little City in the World ( US/Nevada/Reno)
Johannes Elebaut visited Reno in 2018, 2019 and 2022. Gradually, he explored this peculiar place with his camera in hand. The images he has selected for this series were all taken within a radius of 500 metres from the city centre.
Through his lens, we see downtown Reno as a second-rate Vegas: a constructed delusion with its paint flaking off, a capitalistic theme park well past its heyday. We see a place that feels less like a real city and more like a film set – one occasionally traversed by errant extras. Not coincidentally, the first image in the series is titled Truman show, referring to the film in which main protagonist Truman Burbank is the unwitting star of a reality-television soap opera, surrounded by sets and actors.
Through his precise visual language, Elebaut manages to capture Reno’s atmosphere to a tee. The photos are carefully framed, respecting classic aesthetic proportions. Lines and planes form compositions that, from a distance, have an almost graphical quality. The harsh sunlight casts strongly delineated shadows. By making everything sharp and in focus, Elebaut leaves the viewer free to explore the image for themselves. This infinite depth of field further enhances the impression that we are looking at a set decorated with props from recent history. But although the photos may appear staged or even Photoshopped, they are only showing Reno as it is. As a child of the 1980s, Elebaut is fascinated by the American dream. During his formative years, the USA was still leading the way in terms of popular culture. Its movies, music and (M)TV defined what was hip. Now, in 2025, it’s a completely different world.
In this sense, this photo series can be read as a document of its time. The clean lines and colourful planes hark back to the perfect utopia Reno once represented, albeit now littered with trash and weeds. Over the past decades the city has been cut into pieces and rearranged like a collage. The continuous transformation and regular facelifts of the city’s streets and properties has resulted in an interesting aesthetic layeredness.
For example, the parking lot in Yellow poles looks like an archaeological site of twentieth-century capitalist consumer culture: a shipping container stands between an industrial building and a warehouse, with a corporate building in the background belonging to Clear Capital. Scattered around the scene are some bottles and cans, an old electrical enclosure, a fence and some yellow bollards to keep cars at a distance. From the advent of electricity to the globalisation of supply chains and from investment scandals to increasing plastic pollution: Elebaut captures it all in a single image.
(text excerpt from the expo in Brussels by Tim Vanheers & Jonathan Beaton)
Through his lens, we see downtown Reno as a second-rate Vegas: a constructed delusion with its paint flaking off, a capitalistic theme park well past its heyday. We see a place that feels less like a real city and more like a film set – one occasionally traversed by errant extras. Not coincidentally, the first image in the series is titled Truman show, referring to the film in which main protagonist Truman Burbank is the unwitting star of a reality-television soap opera, surrounded by sets and actors.
Through his precise visual language, Elebaut manages to capture Reno’s atmosphere to a tee. The photos are carefully framed, respecting classic aesthetic proportions. Lines and planes form compositions that, from a distance, have an almost graphical quality. The harsh sunlight casts strongly delineated shadows. By making everything sharp and in focus, Elebaut leaves the viewer free to explore the image for themselves. This infinite depth of field further enhances the impression that we are looking at a set decorated with props from recent history. But although the photos may appear staged or even Photoshopped, they are only showing Reno as it is. As a child of the 1980s, Elebaut is fascinated by the American dream. During his formative years, the USA was still leading the way in terms of popular culture. Its movies, music and (M)TV defined what was hip. Now, in 2025, it’s a completely different world.
In this sense, this photo series can be read as a document of its time. The clean lines and colourful planes hark back to the perfect utopia Reno once represented, albeit now littered with trash and weeds. Over the past decades the city has been cut into pieces and rearranged like a collage. The continuous transformation and regular facelifts of the city’s streets and properties has resulted in an interesting aesthetic layeredness.
For example, the parking lot in Yellow poles looks like an archaeological site of twentieth-century capitalist consumer culture: a shipping container stands between an industrial building and a warehouse, with a corporate building in the background belonging to Clear Capital. Scattered around the scene are some bottles and cans, an old electrical enclosure, a fence and some yellow bollards to keep cars at a distance. From the advent of electricity to the globalisation of supply chains and from investment scandals to increasing plastic pollution: Elebaut captures it all in a single image.
(text excerpt from the expo in Brussels by Tim Vanheers & Jonathan Beaton)
Click ︎
