I've discovered the wide universe of photography upside down, if I can say so. During my first year of art school in Paris, I've learned how to develop an image before knowing how to use a camera. The atmosphere, the face to face with oneself, the red light made me feel like I was a mad scientist in a laboratory. I've instantaneously started to experiment and began to make ‘Portraits’. While doing so, I was trying to reveal a form of hidden truth about my model hoping that he would learn something about himself when he saw the finished picture, while I was learning about myself at the same time. The darkroom became a sanctuary, a key space for my artistic creation, moving beyond capturing moments through photography, to the creative process of developing and processing prints. Using techniques such as solarization, superimposition, and rayographs, each of my image underwent metamorphoses to become unique prints. 

My work also involves placing and manipulating objects on photosensitive paper, challenging our perceptions through its reconstructions. A central part of my approach involves “following and abandoning the image, finding it again, adding personal ingredients to reveal its inner life source, then fixing it in space and time.” After ‘Portraits’, ‘Comics and Tales…’ started to emerge.  This time, it was about transcending what I saw in the model to make him become a for ever-lasting character... I still create surrealistic pictures which is my favorite area. I like transforming reality. Since 2017, I also worked on different heritage sites like the Castle of Esquelbecq in the north of France. Just like silver print paper that reacts to light, its brick-walls are printed with history and tell us something invisible to the naked eye. In a way, this work gave me once again, the impression of being an interpreter of the imperceptible. From human depth to the memory of matter...

My love of photography is intrinsically linked to its original technique: film and print. Nowadays, the transition to digital photography has revolutionized the medium so much that the new generation doesn’t even know how an image is processed from negative film to paper print… The magic of light is fading away… Printing a photo is undoubtedly like painting with light. Would you rather see a sculptor working with his hands full of clay or a 3D digital sculpture made by a robot...? Our era has gradually detached us from the material, forcing us to observe reality and work on digital material through phones and computer screens. 

This is an admirable technical development, don’t get me wrong, but it seems to me, to be a world away from my artistic approach : an artisanal and secular know-how, an acquired knowledge that travels year after year from our guts through our soul, to finally being materialized on a white canvas! It is a role that is very dear to me.

Just as this technique of the past was able to tame and capture light, film also has something mystical about it. A way of capturing both the visible and the invisible and even sometimes reveal beautiful creative accidents. I have always been fascinated by the forces of the ‘unseen’, a glance on sensitivity and imagination, the borders between darkness and light... The unknown that many of us feel despite our increasingly materialistic times.