Vous trouverez sur ce site la plupart des projets qui remplissent ma vie depuis que je « réalise », autrement dit, depuis que je donne une réalité à mes idées.

First Photos

Phanie et mon pied sur la figure

Phanie and my foot

une image de la série "in litus" ou "sous-vetement"

Underwear

Photography was my first creation medium

I started photography when I was 18. It allowed me to grow, to see things with hindsight, to get a social status, to meet the world. The photo lab of my local youth club was no longer in use for several years; it became my precious dark room, where I isolated for long afternoons, where I started to choose the framing, the density, the tones of the reality I liked best.

I was lucky to work from their beginning, more or less, with la Griffe and le Zef, 2 free cultural magazines in Rennes. For them, I shot the portrait of many singers (before going to their shows). In 1995 with other photographers I covered the music festival les Transmusicales, for which, each day, a special edition was published. These three evenings of concerts, encounters and of night work in the lab where very happy ones.

Simultaneously, I started arts at university where photography was very important.

My little sister was my devolved human Guinea pig. She was the strange silhouette in litus (also called« série sous-vêtements »). My foot on her cheek was chosen to be the cover of the EP Le retour à la lune by the band Les autres.

I don’t show many of these first photographic images here: most of them are portraits of people that I took in the streets of Rennes and I don’t have their permission. I “captured” them at peak hours on the Lys market on Saturday morning or on the evenings of Music day. Or also at the funfair. That is where I took “ the blind family”: the little girl is holding the hand of her mother and of her big sister who are both closing their eyes at this precise moment. With this image I got the contrary of what I was looking to capture: the gaze of people directly inside my camera lens. I wanted people to look at me. I wanted to find this crossing point between our two bodies inside an image. As I like this picture very much, I want to show it, with this other picture taken from the “A view from my window” series. This was the third theme and the last step of the École Louis Lumière competition. On an evening of Music Day I took off our kitchen window and put it on trestles in the city centre streets. Christine my sister was keeping it while I was photographing it. 

I didn’t win the competition. And I have no regrets. 

Today I don’t like black-and-white anymore. I used it because I could develop it alone, but today, I don’t like black-and-white anymore. I find it mannered. I’m not into nostalgia. 

Dominique A à Rennes avec Françoise Breut concert à l'Antipode en 1995

Dominique A and Françoise Breut, 1995

Mud aux transmusicales en 1995

Mud at the Transmusicales, 1995

Philippe Katerine avant un concert à Rennes

Philippe Katerine in Rennes, 1996

La famille aveugle

The blind family

Série vue de la fenêtre, Rennes

A view from my window