INTERVIEW AT GALERIE PATRICK REYGADE

A Conversation About Photography, Light, and Japan

In May 2026, Galerie Patrick Reygade in Marseille hosted an exhibition conceived around two bodies of photographic work, two spaces and, ultimately, two approaches that respond to one another.

On the ground floor was presented 「ラッセラー、ラッセラー!」Rassera, Rassera!, a photographic narrative created in 2023. In the gallery’s basement, a retrospective offered an opportunity to discover a body of work specifically devoted to light, its movements, and the transformations it brings about in our perception of reality, like a print or a calligraphic work.

On the occasion of this exhibition, Nathalie Petitjean Ozog, Artistic Director of Galerie Patrick Reygade, invited me to take part in an interview about my photographic practice.

This conversation deliberately goes beyond the subject of the works on display. It provides an opportunity to explore my deep relationship with photography, considered not simply as a tool for representing the world, but as a medium through which to offer another vision of it.

What interests me in an image is not so much reproducing what the eye sees, but rather attempting to reveal a more inner dimension. Framing, movement, light and abstraction allow photography to become a form of graphic writing. My desire is for it to be capable of translating ineffable sensations: an energy, a vibration, a feeling, an emotion, something like a breath. In fact, more simply, something that moves behind the appearance of the things we see and allows the image to be inscribed within other temporalities.

The interview also brings to light a connection with my practice of aikido and my knowledge of Japan. Without seeking to establish a systematic or theoretical relationship between these different fields, certain correspondences emerge naturally: the relationship to movement, to distance from things, to a highly centered sense of temporality, to energy, to emptiness, to the circulation of forces and spaces, as well as this attentiveness to what is not visible.

This interview offers a rare opportunity to put words to these connections and to evoke what sometimes lies behind the construction of my images.

I invite you to discover this conversation with Nathalie Petitjean Ozog, recorded at Galerie Patrick Reygade in Marseille on the occasion of the May 2026 exhibition.

THE EYE OF PHOTOGRAPHY | INTERVIEW

THE EYE OF PHOTOGRAPHY

A Favorite of L’Éléphant

Eric Petr is a French photographer born in 1961.

He lives in Marseille and, very discreetly, walks around with his camera into public and sacred places. His photographs dazzle, amaze young children through their beauty. They subjugate, astonish mature viewers.

Eric Petr, at seven years old, was a precocious and talented “shooter”. Humble and belonging to no one, his photos, variations of light, summarize what life is: fragility and greatness. …

INTERVIEW

Why did you choose photography?

I didn’t choose it. It imposed itself on me as if something in my subconscious memory was always connected to it. When I look into the eye of my camera, a distance from the world is created, and this distance is what gives me the necessary space to feel in sync with this world. Ever since I looked though the viewfinder of the 6×9 my father lent me at a very young age, I was fascinated by this alternating ambiguity between being an observer and an actor in the observation. For me, photography is the way to free something unconscious, dominated by an instinctive drive, inspiration.

How did you end up making these types of photos?

It was a long journey, but, in the end, when I think about it, everything is pretty consistant. I always had the desire to draw out the invisible record of the interconnection of universal elements and the relationship that connects us to them.

What would you like to photograph you haven’t yet?

My dream would be to photograph what came before the Big Bang, just to reassure myself and tell that our universe is only a fraction of a spark of a world in perpetual movement, not a world frozen between parentheses, a world without a father.

What influences the figurative for you?

The figurative stabilizes the elements. It assures us that we are. It reassures us in the sense that we can see, is. It creates an image frozen in our present. This image take an atemporal dimension through which our minds can travel in the spacetime of our imagination.