About
Why photography?
Above all, photography for me is a way to ‘be’ in this world, to experience a connection, a relationship. Photography is an opportunity to discover the energy, the flesh of the world (a chiasmus according to Merleau-Ponty). It is the necessary friction with reality, giving birth to differences, to perspectives, be they poetic, aesthetic or even political and to resistances, ever more frequent, intense and profound in the face of the sequences of normalisation. It is a means to avoid suffering. There exists in this gesture a desire to break away from the habits that paralyse.
To photograph becomes an anchor that secures to life, as well as a force of inversion where the loss of self-control becomes an act, a necessity or even a pleasure. In certain respects, photography is a spiritual exercise.
It is also a way to question our profound intimacy, a way to study the world and its people. A desire to understand and to be understood, it is inseparable. “To photograph, rather than to philosophise”, to paraphrase Nietzsche. Photographing people and the world is a way for me to ‘be there’.
Photography is a mode of existence, a link that constantly questions, deepens, enriches. To practise photography, it is to keep one’s eyes alert, to exercise a quality of sharpness but also to relax and savour the pleasure of our existence.
How would you define your perception of the world?
I see the world with a certain melancholy because I am aware that everything is ephemeral. But this perception, instead of being debilitating, invigorates the way I see the world, giving me an acute awareness of the fragility of humans and things and therefore the beauty of life itself. There is an urgent need to live well in this fragile and transient nature and most of all, a duty of lightness and elegance, a longing for freedom and harmony.
In what way does it impact your photography ?
This perception deeply nourishes my photography. It acts as a requirement, a catalyst. To photograph is a need, a way to live this world. It clearly orientates my instincts and photographic pleasure, as my relationship with the night or with the colour red and other colours for example, as well as humour or the irony of certain situations.
What are the influences of your work? What nature are they?
I can say that a mosaic of currents has influenced me: I appreciate French, American and Japanese street photography. The way that Garry Winogrand seemed to question his era, searching for an American "essence". In another register, I like the idea of Daido Moriyama who feels like a stray dog, guided by instinct, devouring the streets of Japanese cities.
However my main influence is the photographers who worked with colour, such as William Eggleston, who manages to dilute the human in his photographs, in favour of everyday objects, giving a sense of mystery or even worry or absurdity to life. Saul Leiter before him knew how to play with climatic elements to deliver a poetic vision through colour.
I love the work of Harry Gruyaert on colours, the latter having a pronounced graphic sense, knowing how to play with strong shadows. I am also sensitive to the photography that is more unreal and vaporous as that of Dolores Marat where situations transform within an oniric and overturning blink of an eye.
Certain philosophical authors such as Nietzsche, painters like Utrillo, Manet, sculptors like Praxiteles, poets like Baudelaire and Sapho also constitute my notable influences in the sense that I feel that these authors were able to examine our condition, revealing a piece of beauty, a piece of mystery with respect to our existence and to life itself.
Was there a particular event in your life responsible for these influences, a turning point, or was it a sum of experiences?
My relatively tough upbringing has created in me a need for elation, for greatness and for freedom. This has led me on paths where sensuality was not absent,
*** where the consideration of others to crack ambient egotism ***
When and how did your vision crystallise in photography?
This need to photograph settled in permanently after completing my Masters in Philosophy . This experience was frustrating because I discovered that education essentially turned towards conceptual work, but which moreover seemed drained of existential fabric. Understanding the world through the prism of philosophy as was taught became a dead end for me.
I realised the need to get in touch with the world (again), to be anchored to it, to be anchored to the opposite end of where my philosophical convolutions had lead me to. I gave way to the songs of the sirens of photography, bearing a poetic promise, foreign, irrational and free. My photographic practice still relates to this event. In any case, I always try to keep it alive.
Do you have specific aesthetic themes or not?
The city remains my favourite photographic field to be able to capture poetic and foreign atmospheres and ambiances. For that reason, my subjects are more often urban elements (houses, storefronts, streets) rather than people. My photography is not intended to document and I like the fictional novel effects of a photograph. However I do not want to fall into the exclusivity of narration because I like it when images trigger this sense of beauty dear to Kant. This means that my photographs are more inclined to possess an emotional quality than a narrative quality.
This affinity for emotion is incidentally inseparable from the matter of colour, and in a certain way the night, because it gives me the opportunity to express a powerful melancholy I like to feel. The night is conducive to questioning any certainty by its ambivalent and mysterious side. In this photographic universe, my characters often appear as silhouettes, fleeting shadows or even, spectral. Humanity is there but it combines with the urban environment as slaves to the project of colour that runs through the city.
Finally, the journeys that have a photographic aspect, they are vital to the encounter with otherness, with other realities (social, cultural, aesthetic, ...) that shake our most perennial habits.
Travel and photography in general carry a psychological palingenesis.
Can you define your aesthetic: colour or black and white, sharpness, blur?
Colour: this is what I photograph because it is directly involved in a physical experience of the world. Black and white is more abstract and points towards a values or even intellectual balance in a scene. Goethe, in his "Traité des couleurs" says that when the artist is guided by his feeling, colour immediately appears. Colour embodies emotions, affects us and through this creates physical relationships. It appears less intellectual and more intuitive at first.
What interests me in colour is that it "illuminates the unconscious" (to quote the painter Patrice Giorda). This means that colour itself reveals a space, inside and outside. It has before it a connection revealing a spatial experience. So colour experiences and penetrates this space that we can therefore understand and become acquainted with.
What I also love about colour, is its power of inversion, conducive to photography. With colour, I'm simply here. I will say that with colour we pass from the seeing order to the existing order. It carries that sense of self which diffuses throughout the world, revealing fleeting but oh so powerful pleasures. Colour is the witness of a humble and sincere affection for existence. Colour carries an aesthetic praise for freedom and sensuality.
My work on colour is of course inseparable from that of light. For once, I do not denigrate any: neither the intermediary without sparkle, gaudy nor the hushed, velvety or flamboyant. This is by an aesthetic taste. I like playing with the black of the night as it reinforces the intensity of colour, such as the day-time shade (In his report of combinations, Goethe affirms that combined with black, the active side of a colour (red for example) gains energy – Traité des couleurs, note 831).