The Place Saint-François in Lausanne is one of the busiest spaces of the Swiss city: public transportation hub, gathering place, shopping district, and site of civic engagement and demonstrations. Situated on the edge of Lausanne's historic town city center, it defies a single definition. Shaped by its many uses and architectural styles, as well as by the diversity of people who sojourn or pass through, it manifests a reflection and distillation of contemporary urban life.
Swiss photographer Olivier Vogelsang's long-term art project SAINF, which he has been conducting since 2019, documents everyday life, urban changes, and defining events that shape the Place Saint-François as a public space. The series, shot with a medium-format camera, forms a sensitive fresco in which the passage of time, individual life-paths, and collective tensions intersect. With a patient and attentive eye, SAINF recounts a slice of microcosmic urban history.