PHOTOGRAPHY TECHNICS
I am a photographer in perpetual motion who learned to frame instinctively. I use my digital camera like a film camera, few shots and a prime lens. I like monochromatic universes and underexposure. The drone recently opened me up to a new dimension.
Movement and point of view
I am a man on the move, a photographer-surveyor. My technique is to move forward, to always roll, without ever going back, no matter where I go, randomly. This does not prevent freeze-frames: that the relationship to reality is first staged, instinctively by the choice of a certain distance, of a field of vision, of a speed of gaze, of an exhibition. The question of the point of view turns out to be decisive for me: choosing the right distance to clearly define the spatial relationships between the different elements, to prepare a game of formal order.
A digital camera used as a film camera
I work with a digital camera, without using a tripod to gain spontaneity. My photographs nevertheless display the attributes of steady film cameras, the usual tool of the landscape designer: assertive geometry, balanced composition.
With a camera set to manual mode, and very few shots, a legacy of my history with film photography, I want to avoid the frenetic shooting expected from our era and technologies from digital and so-called communication networks. The first image is often the best.
Recently, I acquired a digital camera with a wide angle prime lens: a machine that allows me to renew my photographic approach, to better experiment by limiting myself, by exploring space as an actor to discover new angles.
A monochromatic approach. Underexposure.
In my desire to concentrate visual expression around a single idea, I prefer color photography to traditional black and white. Working color for its creative power: color is not reduced to itself, it acts. Let myself be carried away by my chromatic impressions. Color is indeed closer to sensible reality, it stimulates better than black and white would, with the difficulty that it brings to the eye a quantity of information likely to disperse attention. Hence the idea of working with a limited number of monochrome colored planes to dramatize and concentrate, to reveal visual dynamics, to shift the gaze. I devote myself to the mix of monochrome universes, in the tradition of abstraction. I like to make the light vibrate by experimenting with flat tints of color, in particular through harmonious contrasts of bright colors, in a search for balance with the purity of the line. I register my work in an aesthetic principle often using only horizontal or vertical lines, pure colors and a certain balance in the composition.
Black is important in my work. I like to open my palette to its deep darkness, the underexposure allows me to avoid sentimentality.
Flown over landscapes
Seen from the field of Urbanism in France, landscape photography has recently gone through three successive periods. The first period, dating, the “Glorious Thirties”, highlighted the helicopter vision. At this time, we thought of the development by taking height, both literally and figuratively. We looked at France from above to better appreciate its geography. The second period, in the early 1980s, saw a redemptive break with the creation of the DATAR Photographic Mission. The contemporary landscape is reinvented and represented there from “pedestrian” photographs. The project's sponsors insisted that photographers produce images "at eye level"; aerial photography is strictly prohibited. The very recent third period saw the birth and fast growing use of the drone. We take height with the drone, to find in the landscape a poetics of form.
The drone allowed me to change my point of view, by showing from above, elements that we would not be able to see on a daily basis, or at ground level: to see the world differently, thus allowing everyone to look again at what he believes he knows, affirms that it is the point of view that forges our opinions. My photographs thus no longer result from the recognition of forms, but from the elaboration of a point of view based on the personal relationship established between the territory and myself. With the drone, the landscapes flown over oscillate between the recognizable reality and the abstract, especially when diving at 90° (bird's eye). The abstract photographs thus created offer an extraordinary perspective, making the viewer lose all bearings. This is exactly what attracts me with the drone: swinging between reality and abstraction. By deliberately avoiding the horizon and photographing vertically, I reinforce the feeling of disorientation, I create dreamlike aerial photos.