Passer-by (2018-2019)

 

Humanist photography has made street portraiture a way to collect faces at different times. Behind the intrigue of the discovery of this other, there is always amazement, the mark of otherness. The adventure of the Passer-by serie began in november 2018. I settled on the urban forecourt. Somewhere in Paris, in a place where light could play the role of flash on faces. And following an obsession, for months, I put myself there, in the same place, on days of blazing weather, when the sky is on fire; device screwed and discreetly playing all those who passed by; I made their chiaroscuro, I captured them in the manner of an entomologist of gestures, figures, expressions, in a systematic way. And behind the rigor of the photographic protocol, there was in me the search for an encounter. My photograph of street and passers-by is thus like a catalog, an archipelago of faces, contemporaries and witnesses of the humanity of our time. In obtaining my shots of passers-by, a double protocol: the choice of chiaroscuro, and the after-the-fact constitution of a fictitious narration with the end-to-end placing of the obtained images. The play between the boundaries of street documentary photography and studio staging due to the punctual lighting on faces on a plain black background, is also part of my approach.