What about me?
French Photographer
Mysteries are found in most of the familiar things
I like the idea that a photo could show something that is familiar to us in a different way. I am not looking for a strict representation of reality because I want to express what I feel. Photographing for me is like an obsession to record more what my mind sees than what my eye sees. The search for this type of photography I have acquired it intuitively since my teenage years but it has been when I retired that I decided to devote myself to developing this vision.
Edward Weston is the photographer who influenced me the most. I am very sensitive to what he said when he wrote : “To photograph a rock, have it look like a rock, but be more than a rock”.
I also really like the work of Moholy Nagy, Paul Strand, Aaron Siskind, Harry Callahan and Yasuhiro Ishimoto. A more recent contact with the photographer Maurice Sherif helped me better understand my photographic vision.
If I had to find an axis in my own photographic work I would call it : “The search for the strength of simplicity”.
Share the meaning of life and the inevitability of death
Photographing helps me ask questions about the visible world and express my ideas about the passage of time and the inevitability of death. I find myself in another space-time when I take photographs. A photograph haunts us not only because of its composition or lighting or content, but also because of the tension between life and death, beauty and decay, artifice and reality.
I like to photograph nature, trees, sand and people, … but also cemeteries. Why cemeteries? For the calm, for the purity of the forms. I do not try to express the sadness but rather the feeling that one experiences in these places to approach this strange limit between life and death. I don’t like artificial arrangements or special effects that transform reality. I prefer to create a loss of reference points to alter the relationship with reality and to appeal to the imagination.