A Conversation with Photographer Roman Leiba

Over the summer I’ve been working in La Défense, Paris’s business district. It’s an area with a grim energy, harsh, and inhospitable. Skyscrapers marked Deloitte, Total Energies, EDF, reflect the blinding July sun onto the hot concrete. It’s a sterile environment, full of office workers and sanitized eateries.

La Défense was born from the ban on high towers in the city center, forcing business buildings into a sort of corporate exile zone on the outskirts. I’d only ever seen it looking miniaturized from afar, but now every morning I come up among the towers feeling small.

It’s also at La Défense that I met Roman Leiba, at an event that he’d been hired to photograph. Scrolling through his portfolio, I stopped again and again at his shots taken around Paris, of grids, rooftops, windows and building. Throughout the variety of architecture displayed, what remained was the same pervasive feeling of eerie oppresiveness, a feeling of being terrifyingly small.

A few days later we sat at a cafe a walk away from our office, voice memo open in my hand and a cigarette in his.

Roman Leiba: When I take photos, it’s because I see something that makes me tick. They all have a little something to look at. It’s often a light or a color. In my latest one, it’s a plane.

Figure 1 07/01/2025 sauron's eye

The plane was only the second thing I noticed in the photo. Sitting atop the tower’s jagged spike is a red light, so far away it could be a star.  It appeared like Sauron’s eye, watching the world and me. The scale of the building and the void behind lend the image an almost menacing air, locking the viewer in at the foot of a giant.

Most of his photos brought on similar feelings. Roman however seemed unaffected.

Juliette Potier: When something strikes you, does it come with certain emotions?
RL: Honestly no, I’m just really focused, trying to get the right settings and all. I try to concentrate and stay professional.
JP: Your photos bring up certain emotions for me. I find them oppressing. You’re not trying to capture a feeling? 
RL: I see what you mean. It’s a certain brutality that I try to capture.

Roman's art had hit me deeper than it had him. Perception of his surrounding went as far as his lens, assessing the image for aesthetic appeal and technical force. I looked at his photos with the sensitivity of a child in the dark, feeling dread and looking for figures in the composition.  

The visual brutality he mentioned felt significant. It’s a feature that comes up early in his architectural shots. As we flip through images, he stops on one.

RL: This is the first photo I was proud of:

04/11/2024 The first photo I was proud of

Barred off in black and white, the building again seems huge. The angles are almost inverted, the grid is in front, but also on top. Reflections distort what may or may not be continuous lines. Something is trapped here. Leica’s pictures consistently make ordinary surroundings seem terribly uncomfortable.

He shows me another picture he loves. 

05/01/2025 still beer

Two opposite scenes hang in the frame like paintings.

RL: To the left, a man cooking his pasta. You can’t really see him, he’s blurry, but he’s there. Because of the long exposure. He was moving around in his kitchen, making himself pasta. It was three am, and right next door, a party.

The photo was taken with 15 seconds of exposure, to capture the movement it both windows. At the party, someone’s beer was the only thing that stayed still.

Many of Roman’s photos use similar long exposure, and none are taken with a tripod. This requires him to stay absolutely still when the photo is taken. As such he is often removed from the action going on around.

RL: I’d much rather capture the moment than live it. To just be in the bubble with my camera, where I control everything, where I’m in charge and I can get the results I want, or not. That’s what makes me happy.

Roman describes the process of taking photos as one of alien disconnect. Focused and quiet, he pauses, turns the camera on, checks his settings and then checks out.

RL: It’s never happened with you, because we’re in the office ,but someday it will, if we see each other again. You’ll see me stop talking, I’m in my little bubble doing my own thing. It can be a little disturbing.

06/11/2025 outlet

Being the one to capture the action means you constantly depend on other people to make things happen. Roman shows me an image of beaming yellow light coming out of window. Past the light, I’m drawn to the two round windows that peak out of the side of the building. They look like two little black holes, next to which the warm light seems to be making a desperate escape.

JP: That light is perfect. 

RL: I’m so lucky that this person set up their light like that, to get this result. I feel like this photo was kind of given to me.

He speaks of his subjects with a deep gratitude. You get the sense that to Roman, photography is an exploration, almost a hunt. He tells me that over time, he’s gotten better at finding the beauty in his surroundings. Today, he’s struck by potential everywhere.

He shows me more, people, plants, objects. We stop again at a gargantuan architectural shot.

07/04/2024 babel

Haussmanien buildings border the edges, creating a corridor towards the modern builds and the sky above. Somehow, the lines seem to carry the gaze both down and up, creating a dizzying effect.

JP: It’s a bit hard to get your bearings in this photo.

RL: Yeah. It doesn’t really look like I’m on the ground floor. You can’t really tell where I am.

The photo is clear, exposed, but also intimidating. Striking white against gray clouds the building up on the hill looks like a tower of Babel.

RL: I chose to make it black and white because the contrast is better. And also to try and reach my audience, that I always find very naïve when it comes to photos, but because they’re not artists.

This seems to be a point of contention for Roman. When he speaks of his audience, it’s always with a kind of ruthful tone. His photography is so anchored in his skill and technical appreciation. The reception of his work feels like a measure of objective talent. He takes the attention personally. There is a lot of frustration and maybe artistic insecurity. While searching for approval, he carves his own lane in opposition to others. He also is very engaged in the art of capturing subjects that might be mundane to others. This is something he takes a lot of pride in.

JP: Why this need to be different, to take photos that others wouldn’t?

RL: I don’t necessarily agree with you there, it’s not that I want to be different.

JP: You’ve mentioned it to me a few times though.

RL: But it’s not an obligation, I don’t tell myself I need to be different when I take a photo. I do want my photos to be original and all, but…You have me a little trapped here.

JP: You can say it if it’s an ego thing.

RL: Yeah, it is my ego. I want to make photos that people notice. When you saw them, you told me you thought they were cool. And that went straight to my heart, because it’s my little passion. So of course, I’m touched. I am driven maybe by individualism and ego. A need for success.

Ego again often builds itself through comparison and struggle. In some of his most beautiful shots, the exertion is palpable. I can tell when he just nailed it. He shows me another picture.

RL: This is the photo I’m most proud of, because an artist before me tried to take the shot, and his photo is ass.

06/02/2024 collage

The colors and dimensions in this image strike me immediately. The green apartment, the baby blue building, the wood in the foreground. All the contrast.

RL: In the back you have that huge building, kind of Gotham city-esque and all those little white lights. What drives me crazy is that there are more walls than building. I just don’t get how that building is set up. And then the Paris sky polluted with artificial light. It makes the sky look orange.

The lines are so crisp they look fake, more of a collage than an actual photo. But the buildings really do exist, all together, in the 14th near Montparnasse. It’s easily the most technically impressive photo of the collection.

Going through all the photos, our perceptions clashed at points. Paranoid intensity crossed with cool focus, each tainting the images with lived experience. But we both met having been struck by the particular beauty of Roman’s subjects on the screen.

The day after our conversation I take my usual metro to La Défense. Looking out the window as we emerge onto the esplanade, I recognize the building from the first photo. In the morning sunlight and from my own two eyes, it doesn’t look half as impressive.