How did you get into artistic photography?
I originally had a scientific background. And when I was 14, there were Parvis workshops at the middle school. For a year, we trained with Guy Jouaville, who was the curator of the contemporary art center, on what artistic photography was. We moved away from geographic photography and photojournalism to focus more on people like Mapplethorpe and Giacomelli, opening up a new space for us. And then there was Louis Castille, who had us develop our photos because at the time, he was a film photographer. I put photography aside for about ten years, but I came back to it around the age of 25. I needed to express myself. And I did it with photography.
Why did you choose photography to express what isn't necessarily visible?
I rarely photograph people. I'm going to focus on objects that don't have any value for a beautiful photo, on leaves that aren't necessarily very interesting to photograph. I also often work in the dark. For me, when you take a geophotography, a beautiful landscape photo, it's the landscape that you find beautiful, not the art of photography. And it's enough in itself. It's the same when you look at a family photo; it's the people who provoke an emotion, not the photo. My approach is to use vulgar objects, objects that have no interest in themselves, to find the right angle, the association, the staging that will allow me to take a photo that interests me. Yesterday it was the chair you're sitting on. I've seen it very often, but this time I saw it differently. I chose an angle that crushes the perspective. Like some paintings.
Have you already exhibited your work?
Yes, I've already exhibited twice here at Atelier 20, in 2015 and 2018. And now I've been shortlisted for the Rencontres Photographiques de Boulogne-Billancourt.
What do you want to communicate through your photos?
I don't say what I wanted to do; I leave it up to everyone to interpret them and find something in them. It's actually quite amusing to get quite divergent feedback during exhibitions. When the viewer doesn't see what I thought was visible, or, on the contrary, sees what I didn't know I had included in the photo.
What makes one photo interesting and not another?
Emotion. It's affect. I look for photos that convey emotion. There's also Guy Jouaville, who has a great knowledge of photography, who looked at my photos and selected them. When a photo pleases, when a photo speaks, there's no need for explanations. This doesn't prevent me from analyzing the photos, as did the experts at the Rencontres Photographiques, who told me I had a style, that my photos were poetic.
How do you evoke emotion in your photos?
That's a good question. I haven't analyzed my approach. It's a question of personality, just as someone who writes has style. I don't prepare anything. I see something. That's when I reach for the camera to capture it. It's the eye that discerns something singular and extraordinary. There's a part that belongs to the subconscious or instinct. I look, I circle around an object. And at one point, I press the shutter. I let myself be guided by instinct. It's instinct that brings out my creative side.
Rencontres Photographiques de Boulogne-Billancourt
It's a jury of agency directors, exhibition curators, and photographers gathered around Claude Lelouch that the photographers must convince. They must convince others to be preselected, like Frédéric Patacq, based on their application, and then choose them among the 10 finalists. And why not follow in the footsteps of Anaïs Tondeur and her work Noir de Carbone? Or seduce the public, who also awards their grand prize.
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