Aurélien Villette (Le Chesnay, 1982) is a French photographer.
A lifelong traveler, he seeks out landscapes and architectures where the trace of human presence is omnipresent, often sleeping in a tent in order to capture the many facets of a place or to find the perfect light for a shot. It is thanks to this “nomadic” approach that the photographer connects with the context—its nature and its history—and synthesizes it in his images. The result is a representation of the “spirit of the place,” understood as the soul of a territory, its deepest essence shaped by all those typological, environmental, morphological, and historical characteristics that, taken together, define it as a unique entity.

In 2012, Villette received the “SFR Jeunes Talents – Special Jury Mention” award for the series Structure et Déstructurés during Paris Photo.

The Dogma series is one of the most important within this extensive body of research. Begun in 2010, it was first published in 2014 and won First Prize at the International Photography Award in the Professional Architecture – Historic category in 2014. Dogma brings together photographs of places of worship in more than 50 countries that Villette has visited during his many travels. The series aims to represent the fragile link between the desire to build everlasting sacred spaces and their current conditions, showing that nothing is static and that any place could disappear. The fate of these buildings, like everything else, is tied to the upheavals of history and to the changing customs and landscapes of the world.