How did I make this?

Recently I was invited by the beautiful Pauline Goyard to talk about my creative photography on Adobe France’s YouTube channel. What an honour to be invited by the software editor of Photoshop to talk about your passion to the world for an entire hour!

The content is in French therefore I would like to share a very brief version of it here. You will know more about my inspirations, recurrent themes of my creations and the way I shoot and composite.

1) My inspirations

I am mostly inspired by figurative paintings. Some of you already know that Caravaggio is one of my key inspirations. I love how everything is dramatic in his paintings. Each body, each gesture, each shadow, each interaction is perfectly dosed drama.

My other influences are, just to quote a few of them, Fra Angelico, Hieronymus Bosch and Sanchez Cotan. Each of them has very unique elements that I can truly connect to for a diversity of reasons.

2) What do I think about when I create?

A whole bunch of things! Most of the time I deal with human relationships in my works. They are mostly my observations of social interactions in my daily life. Every time I have an idea of a group of characters, I dive into the below questions:

The key words below are recurrent themes that I like to work on. The last one contains 2 Chinese characters meaning “to leave blank,” leaving each element in an ensemble sufficient space to breathe. It is a very intuitive concept that can be applied to relationships, work, visual arts, writing, well everything.

3) How did I make this one?

In the Adobe Live I walk you through the way I created this picture entitled “Family Resemblance” (2020).

It started earlier this year during my travel to London. A friend told me about his family background with years and years of emotional abuse. I was shocked by certain behaviours in the story and also the gravity of mental consequences that my friend has to deal with on a daily basis. For sure I am amazed by the kindness this person incarnates despite all this. I also felt that I had to do something that explores this complexity involving family ties, contempt, power and our natural desire of being loved.

Then I remembered this Caravaggio and all the complexity it inspires via the position of the characters, the shadows and the body language of each of the characters and how they interact with each other, despite the absence of physical touch. I wanted the same complexity in my work! I wanted my image to recall this Caravaggio while not intending to make a “copy” of the original (come on, you can’t copy Caravaggio…).

And this is a quick sketch of my idea.

I had no intention to recreate a chopped head… But I wanted that girl to put her own head onto the plate to create ambiguity. Does she look happy? Why does she stay? How are they related? Can she get up and leave? And the lady standing on the left, is she proud of it? Why does she hold the plate? Will the whole thing collapse if she simply walks away?

And this is how I shoot! Small space, no assistant, all DIY (hair, makeup, wardrobe, styling, lighting, props, acting, timing…). I enjoy this luxury of being able to work with 200% concentration on my own. And technical limits are very often fuel for problem solving.

And these are the selected images before compositing! Well, I’m not going to bore you with technical details in Photoshop. You can jump to 49:17 of the Adobe Live video embedded below to see how the images were composited.

If you understand some French I highly recommend watching the video. It is way more dynamic to see Pauline, Franck and I interact during the live. To be 100% honest, it was SO MUCH FUN! Please also take a look at other creatives! I discovered some gems thanks to this channel.

Remake of a remake

In 2018 I made a self-portrait inspired by the (so often) parodied Gabrielle d'Estrées et une de ses sœurs by an unknown artist (c. 1594). It is very interesting to read the analysis of the details, such as the nipple pinching, the ring and the baby behind. So do take a few minutes for that if you are curious!

In my version I wanted to talk about sisterhood, more precisely the nastiness that can exist in close relationships. I was happy with the result and mostly proud of my hair and makeup!

However, one technical imperfection made that I could not include it into my portfolio: my eyes were not in focus! It is very obvious once I zoom in. This can happen so often when making self-portraits. I just totally forgot to pay attention to it during the shoot! Working alone gives you flexible hours but you may not have your eye on everything at the same time! But having the eyes out of focus in a portrait can totally screw up the whole thing.

So my first attempt remained in my mind with an unfinished taste of failure. But I moved on to other projects.

2018 - This still the beginning of my series of composite photographies with self-portraits.

In September this year, I decided to remake the whole picture with the right focus as well as one more element from the original painting - the curtains. The curtains are important to me because I want that theatrical touch. I also decided to have the girl bend her elbow so that the whole thing can fit into my favourite 2x3 dimension.

The result is right below. I’m honestly very happy with what I’ve got.

September 2019 version

It is interesting to look at the reluctance I experienced to remake this picture after my first attempt. I spent more than a year doing other things, while thinking back to this project every few weeks. In my mind, I pictured a whole lot of work for the remake, while actually I accomplished several other way more complicated pictures! Once I decided to do it, I actually shot everything in the same evening. We are funny beings who sometimes spend more energy fearing the imaginery workload instead of doing it in an efficient way.

I hope this picture makes you smile. I hope at least you will feel free to project your own meanings onto it.