Alain Pras

The pivotal moment of his early career would be when he caught sight of a cover of Pilote featuring a brightly-colored image of the popular French jazz musician Claude Luter standing among a network of New-Orleans style model trains that he himself had built. Pras would continue to refer warmly to this image for years to come, as it was then that he decided to become a model architecture designer. After studying the trade, completing his military service and working variety such as stone lithography, he first began photographing the industrial sites, trains, and stations he visited in these intervening years.

In 1977, he joined the French train model-maker Jouef, where he created 25 mockups of trains for the first large exposition at the newly-inaugurated Centre Pompidou. Titled “The Age of Trains” (Le Temps des gares), Pras’ work was largely hailed by critics, including Le Monde’s André Fermigier, who wrote: “Alain Pras’ extraordinary models reconstitute faithfully and with a certain poetic truth all the charms of their originals.”

After this first major success, Pras’ work attracted prestigious clients from both France and abroad, including the SNCF (the French national train network), Alstom, Airbus, Air Liquide, Aréva, as well as the French national Army and Navy. With 35 collaborators, the company continued reproducing large- and small-scale industrial prototypes, such as, notably, the eight-meter-long life-size mockup of the nose of a TGV train exhibited in front of the New York Stock Exchange.

Nevertheless, throughout these years, Pras continued to tour and photograph industrial sites, factories and ports, developing the notion of what he would later call “Industrial Beauty.” With a 6 x 6 Rolleiflex bi-lens camera in hand, he captured breathtaking views of water towers, hydraulic cranes, and signal boxes, favoring the vivid colors they often presented. Selling his company in 2009 to concentrate on his photography career, Alain Pras today works mostly in digital photography, continuing to affirm his most pertinent message: Yes, the industrial is beautiful.