- How would you define your photography?
At art school, I thought I would
become an ultra-realistic 3D scene creator. With
3D you start from a totally empty universe, dark,
without any light or any point of view. You can do
whatever you want. But if you don’t place a reference
to reality in the scene, the viewer will be
totally lost, or will think you were on drugs and
delirious! I started creating empty places, with water,
ice, snow, fog and mist, reflections, refraction,
subtle lights and soft shadows. I’ve always been
fascinated by places empty of people, with weird
atmospheres. I found my own universe, not exactly
the same as everybody else.
In a way, I can think, at times, that I am the only human
to converse with the world, this closely, using
my camera as a translator. Exploring is fascinating.
I think I found in photography the medium I need,
a combination between time to result, travelling,
technical skill and visual representation. Also, if I
shoot black and white it isn’t because I’m colour
blind like some claim (to tease me): with a static
representation of the world, you lose the sense of
volume, smell, time, touch and hearing. With B&W
you lose one more 'essential' information, colour.
So you are closer to suggestion than assertion, and
there is more space for sensation and imagination,
in elegant nuances and shades of grey.
- It feels strangely like Occam’s razor used in reverse! With such long exposures, do we lose
the moment in time, is there still a 'decisive moment'?
The moment isn’t in the order of a fraction of a
second any more, but encompasses a 'longer' period
during which the world changes, transforms.
It is a decisive moment when the universe shapes a
rare and hardly reproducible period of time, quite
notably when it comes to climate. Often, I need to
spot the geography, track the weather forecast and
grab the occasion when it comes as the right conditions
can happen, like in the example of moon
phases, only for a few days in a month, sometimes
late in the night. This decisive moment is meticulously
prepared on the basis of a precise mental
construction.
- There is a feeling of loneliness in your photographs or, even further, of absence, including
of a viewer. Still, there is a strange feeling of peace...
What I’m interested in is to leave human and
technological reality aside (even if it is there on the
execution side), to take some distance from this
idea of production, of massive implication of industry,
of profit and exacerbated capitalism. We don’t
look at anything any more, we all run, are materialists,
we protect ourselves from the nature that we
see as hostile ; but this lost tree, forgotten, what
does it see everyday, alone, every night? None of
us would stand that distance, isolation and life
conditions (that we must have experienced a very
long time ago, to be so afraid of them).
What will remain in a decade, a century, a millennium?
The universe and nature expect nothing from us,
we decided, alone, to try and control them. But
time passes inexorably, like the clouds drifting,
the elements represented almost as if in another
chemical state.
Another space-time exists, at a different scale, that
of the universe; it controls us, we do all we can to
ignore it but we are nothing, just dust... And we
self destruct our microcosm with determination...
- Your work has been exhibited in Malaysia, by Taksu in Kuala Lumpur, how did you find being
exhibited so far from home?
Yes, it was during the month of photography
in Malaysia. It remains an exhibition like any
other in its preparation, except that I wasn’t there
to check on the hanging or for the opening. You
have to establish a trust relation with the gallery.
Through the internet, a much larger public can be
reached, very quickly and with similar interests; it
would have been much more difficult in the past.
The new means of communication are a definitive
plus for all isolated people involved in original
projects.
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