Born in 1972, graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie in Arles in 1999.
The series ‘A thin varnish of reality’ (book / box at Éditions Filigranes 2005), Canopée and ‘Matière Noire’ build up the main core of his work, resulting from a daily and contemplative practice.
These series are based on poetic hypotheses, allowing him to follow a personal interpretation of reality.
The book ‘Matière Noire’ is going to be published for the Poursuite editions in 2017.
A photo project is a series of pictures linked together by a common ground; it could be a real story going on, a visual similarity or just a precise sensation or emotion.
Often this linking element is self-evident and clear, but sometimes the key to interpretation may be hidden. Nevertheless, we sense something, we perceive the common ground.
‘Dark matter’ belongs to the second category: as you go through the images you understand there is something beneath, and the moment you know what it is you immediately go back and look at the pictures again, and the project gets even stronger, deeper and denser.
About ‘Dark matter’:
The project Dark matter is a utopia, a photographic hypothesis. Representing 95% of the Earth’s mass, dark matter is an unknown component of our universe, one which astrophysicists the world over are attempting to identify.
To photograph it means anchoring my gaze in a new paradigm, thereby allowing me to identify and photograph objects, landscapes, situations, and people in which I glimpse the dark matter passing through them.
Dark matter is a project marked by a desire to work without thematic or documentary constraint, by slowly accumulating images out of which coherent series can be arranged.
This new working hypothesis emerged from an interest in current research into astrophysics, which attempts to elucidate the secret of the birth of the universe.
‘Five per cent of the universe’s mass is made up of components of ordinary matter, while 25% would appear to be made up of dark matter, and 70% of dark energy. The identity of this black ‘stuff’ remains a mystery.‘ (Brian Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos, 2005.)
Researchers explain that ‘dark matter does not emit light but, conversely, it can be completely traversed by light. It is therefore truly dark, and the only way to see it is by observing its effects on its environment.‘ (Yannick Mellier, an astrophysicist.)
What, then, are the effects of this on our everyday reality? Can they be perceived? Or photographed? Does the camera or sensor capture the effects of dark matter?
This new optical prism, which consists in observing the world while imagining the dark matter moving across it in all directions, is a powerful poetic lever.
I perceive this density as much in images conveying the mass of objects, the gravity of landscapes, or the power of the elements as in what I call the world’s impasses. That is to say, in everything that provokes in us a sentiment of finitude, fragility or impotence.
I have found it in the prison-like absurdity of a piece of architecture, in the massiveness of a mountain, or in roadside flowers. Perhaps tomorrow I will find it in a fire, a scar, or a thunderstorm…
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