My path, in my reflection on the moving image
I was a passionate film photographer from 1983 to 1993. I developed my films and printed my photographs in a photo lab I borrowed from the Paris Airport.
Then I suddenly stopped photography. At that precise moment in its history, I undoubtedly felt that an earthquake had occurred, and that I no longer had a place in it. The digital world was emerging.
And so went the years without taking a single photograph and without touching a camera in the decade that followed.
When I look at my photo albums, I see a gaping hole of a decade’s worth of unprinted memories, some of which have disappeared into the depths of my subconscious.
The first lesson I learned from this deprivation of images is that photography, drawing and travel journals, beyond their beauty, are first and foremost an indispensable and necessary tool for memory.
But I had to step back from my obsessive and sickly relationship with the camera, and the ten years I’d been away from it made me aware of this, and gave me the distance I needed to reflect freely and without constraint on the power of the image, its role, its power, and above all, the way in which the photographic image could touch on the immaterial, the metaphysical, and express unspeakable emotions of the spiritual or invisible order.
And so it was that this decade of gestation, which was accompanied by an intense practice of uncompromising Aikidō, changed my view of the world, or rather, brought to it an acuity that until then had met with some difficulty in expressing itself clearly within me.
It’s also undeniable that Aikidō, in its pure practice, traditional approach, intensive training and regular meditation, provides access to a wider field of spiritual knowledge and our relationship with the universe.
This is how Aikidō has helped me so much and continues to bring me this depth in the conception of my photography.
I would like to express my gratitude to Armand Mamy-Rahaga and Michel Kovaleff who, through their practice of a fair and uncompromising martial art, have helped me to find a path in my reflection, and to resume my photographic work with the strength that Aiki gives us.
Twelfth exposure of a first-ever photo film made after a ten-year hiatus from photography.
So in December 2002, after a ten-year hiatus, I took up photography again, where I had left off in 1993, but with a more structured coherence than my work of the 80s had produced.
It was a chance encounter with a 12-exposure disposable Pocket Instamatic Kodak, initiated by a trip from Thailand to Cambodia.
Twelve great moments of emotion!
Just twelve photos taken during a trip to the ends of the earth is like holding your breath until the end.
On this trip, I learned to take my time, to search my subconscious for the triggering breath of the photographic click, the pleasure of the release.
I realized that photography is, above all, about listening to our universe.
The first photographic works I produced from 2003 onwards (Tōkyō under the rain_2oo3, Bangkok_2oo4, TrAveRséE2nUiT_2oo4, Windows_2oo5, and others), constitute the foundations and underpinnings of a knowledge acquired during this decade of interruption in photographic practice.
The three images I’m presenting today from 2005 are highly representative of my style. My photography not only uses light as the primary constituent of the work, but is also distinguished by its ability to capture the subtlest details of a scene or place, transforming visible objects and magnifying their secret perception. Through this gaze, each image becomes a kind of visual poem, where the invisible takes shape, and the viewer is invited to discover a world all his or her own, while remaining connected to the universal human experience.
These images from my Hong Kong by night series, taken in February 2005, attempt to reproduce the ineffable atmosphere of Asian cities, bringing with them what will become my signature as a photographer, that aspect of dense, poetic luminous matter, that dreamlike atmosphere and that feeling of timelessness.
Although these images were taken twenty years ago, their power makes us forget the poor quality of the digital camera used at the time, which remains a feat.
My photographic work will continue uninterrupted within the framework of this reflection on light, movement, space and time.
I have named this photographic process to define it: “in situ kinetic photography” or “photographie cinétique in situ”.
This work continues today with my Variations de Lumière but also, and always, with 光 (Hikari), Métamorphoses or my Spirituelles Odyssées which gave rise to the publication of a numbered and signed book in 2016, by Corridor Éléphant, Éditeur de photographies contemporaines.
This work on light and movement, which I began to disseminate on social networks in 2010, remained largely unknown to photographers and the general public. My numerous publications gave way, little by little, to a photographic trend that other photographers, in turn, took up and developed on their own, then named in the years 2015 “Intentional Camera Movement”.
I’m happy to be one of the very first investigators of this photographic movement, and to name but a few who preceded me, Kōtarō Tanaka (1905-1995), Ernst Haas (1921-1986), and also my contemporary Alexey Titarenko (b. 1962), who for his part worked specifically on crowds in motion.
I personally see myself as a photographer who has concentrated all my work and efforts over the course of my life on this principal reflection of the moving image, creating a totally unique style.
