About

credit: Gianfranco Busanca

I am a French art photographer and academic researcher living  and working between Paris and Turin.

I need photography as some others need to go running, read a book, or watch TV. The hours I spend working and experimenting in the darkroom are my hours away from the world, the hours when I disappear completely and my head is clear from daily trouble. I love analogue photography for its inherent poetry, the particular value it gives to every single image, and the endless possibilities that the chemical process leaves me to explore.

I started to practice art photography back in 2008 when I bought my first digital reflex, and organized my first exhibition in Paris in 2009. My photographic journey has taken always further into and antique, experimental and/or alternative photographic process. I care for technical knowledge only insofar as I master it enough to overcome it, to know the rules like the back of your hand so that you can bend or break them. Trigger the controlled photographic accident. Let some randomness occur, but keep it somehow on a leash. Find the fragile equilibrium point between reverie and focus.

I shoot on nearly every format and non-digital support you can imagine.

Since 2008, I participated in various projects and had exhibitions organized in France, Italy, Germany, Poland, and Switzerland. In April 2015, I started the ambitious and exciting project of running my own personal travelling darkroom: a moveable vintage photographic set where I shoot portraits in the same way travelling photographers did hundred years ago. Since then, I realized more than a hundred portraits shot and developed on the spot.

credit: Roberta Melchiore

We feel more and more that we are “all photographers”. Some refuse the idea, while others find it thrilling. I do believe it is a reality. A new photographic era is occurring, between instagram and selfie-sticks  on the one hand, and affordable digital reflexes on the other hand, the very idea of photography is mutating once more. More than a revolution, I believe it is only the natural evolution of photography on the path it has been following since its invention back in the 1830’s. Industrially produced plates, celluloid film and Kodak Brownies, TLRs, pentaprisms and SLRs, polaroid, and finally digital photography, are as many milestones on the road that made photography always simpler and more affordable; and photographic materials more sensitive and easier to develop. Faster. “Fast-photography”, maybe.

I on the other hand want every shot to be made special. Put back some symbolic value in every single photograph. I don’t shoot a lot, purposefully. In the last few years I focused specifically on big format photography, mostly for its slow pace which perfectly fits the idea of I what I want my photography to be. A photography about pleasure and magic. Pleasure to shoot a picture like you drink a sip of an old red wine. Pleasure for the models also that eventually have in hand something special, crafted, timeless. That’s what slow photography is.