biography and statement
I was born in France in 1968 and spent my childhood on the Atlantic coast. A few years after graduating from ESCP Business School in Paris, I redirected my career to follow my interests for painting, photography, film and video. I set up an organisation that provided artistic and cultural mediation services in various social settings. After working on a number of video-based initiatives, I trained in digital editing and worked as a film editor, mainly on documentaries. When our daughter was born in 2004, we moved to Vienna, Austria, my wife’s home country. There I divided my time between being a stay-at-home dad and developing my artistic work. I took up painting again, and at the same time, in order to get out of the studio and be less sedentary, I gradually intensified my photography by exploring different places in the countryside.
My main interest is in the representation of the natural landscape in our highly anthropized territories. Initially, I adopted a documentary and topographic approach, seeking to render the residual presence of nature in our ordinary landscape with precision, sobriety and intensity. In the early 2010s, I began a series of river landscapes : the series along the shores consisted of photographing the banks of rivers in France and Austria, often moving into the riverbed with my camera equipment and tripod.
During the lockdowns of 2020-2021, I had two opportunities to redirect my work. Firstly, I had the occasion to thoroughly revisit my sources of inspiration : landscape painting of the 19th and 20th centuries (from the Barbizon School to the Post-Impressionists), the rich history of landscape photography in Europe and the USA, and also the experimental practices of film and photography, whose aesthetic importance is so often underestimated. Secondly I came in possession of a large-format view camera of the 80’s. When using a view camera, you have optical options that cannot be achieved with any other type of camera, however you must separately determine and adjust each shooting setting using non automated mechanical controls. In performing these precise actions, you are constantly reminded of the fundamentals of photography: light exposes a light-sensitive surface, photography is about « un-darkening », without light we are in the dark, no image is formed. Too much light and the image also disappears in a glare… Although I still use the most sophisticated digital cameras, my approach to photography has been refreshed and ‘reset’. My attitude has become more experimental, more direct, more subjective also: since what drives me towards this reality of landscape is the search for an intensity of gaze, since I often experience a feeling of almost hallucinatory presence of nature, I found that I had to rethink my use of the camera to try to create, with the means of photography, an equivalent to this feeling of vertigo and strangeness of certain perceptions in the field.
The work I have been doing since 2021 is based on the technique of multiple exposure, which I rediscovered while experimenting with film. I gradually recompose the landscape framed by the camera, interpreting it in fragments whose photographic parameters I vary. I try to anticipate the effect of partial superimpositions that create a kind of optical vibration of forms. I also play with the spectral character of photographic revelation, with the pulsation of light over time, or with the kind of spatial twists caused by alternating blur and sharpness. Shooting this type of images is a slow process, often taking more than an hour and a half for a photograph that combines a dozen or so exposures. I don’t do any post-processing; the photograph I end up offering is the one that comes straight out of the shooting session, without any kind of retouching. If I think the photograph is not working for me, I have to come back and start again, reacting to the new conditions and trying to find other compositional elements, also relying on controlled chance. This kind of photographic performance in the landscape is very important to me.