1. When and how do you start to create?
I started to create at the age of 17, with a Lubitel and a Rolleiflex. I did a few black and white exhibitions at Le Mans between 1981 and 1984.
2. Do you went to an art school or self-taught?
I followed a Arts school at Le Mans, between 1978 and 1981, then two years of art history at the University of Rennes II and studies of art history, about medieval iconography and the art from the 16th to the 17th centuries at the University of Maine, in Le Mans. Also, internships in video and photo creation between 1992 and 1998.
3. Do you create as a professional or for your own?
It is both an artistic and professional works, as a photographer and as a trainer, multimedia project manager and Digital Asset Management consultant.
4. How do you learn and work your skill?
Very young, I learned photography with my father and in photos clubs. Then self-taught from 1981, with several internships with professionals in the 1990s and 2000s.
5. What do you like in this art, your motivation?
I intended for cinema studies in 1981, studies upset by my parents who did not want me to exercise an artistic profession.
I seek in photography to tell stories, to depict emotions, impressions, stories, to tell the fleeting story of an encounter.
The human is the heart of my work, and more specifically the female universe.
I am motivated by these meetings with the people I am going to photograph, with the artists with whom I collaborate. All these meetings bring experiences, emotions, stories constantly renewed and extraordinary.
6. What do you want to express or arouse in those who watch your work?
Emotion, questioning their own look on beings, a mirror effect with the viewer, the imagination of a story that each one reinvents from the photography or the series that I present.
7. What are your favourite subject(s)?
Themes related to the female universe, drawn from antiquity, Greek tragedies, poetry, literature.
Also research on our perception of the codes of portrait and western gestures.
8. How do you prepare a creation or project work?
I prepare each project from a scenario, a pitch, a storyboard.
I leave a fairly large part to improvisation also.
Each collaboration project with the models I want to work with begins with a casting and a working meeting on the project.
Then I work from moodboard, music, texts.
I attach a lot of importance to the preparation.
10. What are you trying to share via your art?
My personal vision of women, their personalities, their dreams and their fears, their fantasies and their desires, their creations and their ideas.
More precisely, I tirelessly try to find the "beautiful", in the truth of a photograph.
I will quote Peter Lindberg who expressed it better than me: "I try to be true in my work, although on reflection I do not know what" true "means in this context. There is no trick - wanting to make people ugly to take a “strong” photograph only leads to a fake, but on the other hand, beauty cannot be “fabricated” either. And I come back to this nebulous word “the truth ”: It is above all a question of expressing who you really are, and how you feel that a woman sees herself."
11. Who are artists that fascinate or give you inspiration?
First, Peter Lindberg, second Rembrandt, then finally Irving Penn
12. What equipment and/or technic do you use?
Essentially in the studio, with a nikon D750 camera, fixed optics. Ditto for the outside, with flash sometimes. Editing in Lightroom and some retouching in Photoshop.
13. How and why your work as changed since you started?
The evolution of my work is linked to the themes, my research and my exchanges with other photographers and artists, especially in my work as editor for the magazine OPENEYE.FR
Also, the exchanges with the different models and the young women photographers greatly influence the evolution of my work.
14. What does the Internet media give you?
A possibility of exchange of points of view and critics absolutely necessary.
15. What was the best advice given to you as an artist?
Always take the time: the time of preparation, realization and especially post-production. Editing requires hindsight, time for reflection, distance from the work.
After 6 or 12 months, you no longer see your photographs in the same way. We are much more severe with our own production and selective.
16. If you couldn’t be an artist, what would you do?
The same artist, but who wouldn't necessarily be aware of it.
17. What are your plans in the future?
the realization of several exhibitions around my different current themes, "A Woman, a perfume", "digressions around red", "in search of Sarah".
I am looking for new exhibition places and galleries that would be interested in presenting a selection of my works.