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.