Libre ! - Limited Edition 01 of 30 Photograph

Self-taught photographer, I live in Paris, France. I started photography in 1995 and exclusively worked with 35mm film until 2015 when I switched to a digital camera. A part of my work which started in 1996 consists in single long-exposure shots using mostly flashlights, with no image editing in post-processing (apart from what is only necessary in a darkroom - exposure, contrast and subtle local corrections). At first glance a viewer would think of those images as being highly digitally manipulated when they are in fact only the results of small choreographies of light and movement performed in the dark in front of the camera, slowly shaping the resulting image in that single exposure. My main interest using this technique is creating strange or surreal moments relating to the frailty of fading memories or "ghosts", and to our perception of space and time, with a taste for dark and shadowy atmospheres much influenced by cinema. A french writer once wrote something that stayed with me and relates for me to these strange moments of photography : "L'espace fond comme le sable coule entre les doigts. Le temps l'emporte et ne m'en laisse que des lambeaux informes." (Georges Perec, in Espèces d'espaces, 1974) Another and more recent part of my work consists in landscape, cityscape, architecture and street photography, with a particular interest in framing human elements (shadows, geometries, symmetries, traces of human presence or activities, mechanical or structural elements) in the natural landscape, always looking for an intriguing side of things. For this kind of work, I sometimes use multiple shots combinations and digital processing techniques in editing, but always look for a natural result (most of the times the viewer would have no clue that the image has been digitally edited if it were not for my indications of such a process).