News

the “Hereros” series

6 December 2007

Online these next days, the “Hereros” series made in Namibia in August. The hereros and the himbas (series online soon too) are from the same population but separated during the colonisation by the German Empire. From that time, Hereros worked with the German while himbas and buchmen stayed in the nature. The hereros started to dress up like the Germans. In 1905, the herero population started to resist against the Germans and this finished by the sad battle of Wattenberg. After this, the Germans decided to get rid of the herero population, massively. Read more…

You can’t be someone else

19 October 2007

It has to start with a very clear idea, a conviction: You can’t be someone else. Doing this in the context of a himba tribe in the kaokoland area was more than symbolic, as a starting point of this new reseach. Being part of a group is complexe. I’ve stayed out of the cercle, somehow, beeing the outsider of all these groups… But now, I wanna try to get inside the cercle, to get this on my skin. And from the start, I know it won’t work, and that’s just great.

Portrait Michel and Sebastien Bras

3 October 2007

This is the portrait of Michel and Sebastien Bras (Laguiole). It was commissioned by Next (the saturday extra of the Liberation Newspaper in France). I’ve done the portraits of 11 famous cooks, the best cooks of the country, la creme de la creme. I loved some of these meetings. I’ve been always fascinated by this french ideal around Cooking. Actually, I had a doubt about the idea of beeing a painter when I was 22. Reading Gilles Deleuze, the french philosopher, and his theory about Desir, I started to feel that learning to be a painter could not come only from painting, its history and technic. Read more…

Fashion shooting for TETU

21 September 2007

Fashion shooting for TETU, french magazine. I accepted, some years later, a very basic idea: If I shoot fashion, I absolutly expect to use all the established concepts of fashion (make up, stylism, hair dress, and professional models. I’ve started photography in the trendy athmospher of a more realistic fashion. We were invited to shoot fashion with “the real people”… going somewhere with a few stylish t-shirts, sport shoes and jackets and inviting the man of the street to be the model. Facing the pecimism of real fashion photographers at that time, I stopped doing commission for fashion magazine. I now collaborate with a french stylist and accept the whole project as a concept. And that’s interesting, it’s like sculpting, playing with unreal images, esthetism and so on.

The grenadier regiment

20 September 2007

That was in May, near Copenhagen. I already photographed the grenadier regiment in 2004, but the Hussards impressed me too. I found it would be good to have this in the Empire Book. It will be out only in 2008, in two versions (an english one, and a french one).

twin sisters Helene and Estelle in the majorette Uniform

19 September 2007

This is the portrait of the twin sisters Helene and Estelle in the majorette Uniform I designed for the film. They wear a yellow, black and white “lycra” outfit with two white birds on the front. In the film , they are supposed to take part of the “Antoinettes” group. Cinema is really a new experimentation field for me. We’ve been working on its preparation for almost two years already. And it will be a musical. It’s on its way. Sodaperaga, a french film producer is supporting the project. A team is already working on it. It’s the first time I really get inside a group, deciding to design a uniform, to create something using my photographic background as a documentation for my film. The “Bleus de travail” book, the “Majorettes, the “Steps”, the “Donneurs” books really helped me to define my scenario. And the “Matière grise” series is also a very important base for my story.

Here’s the base of my Seijinshiki series

10 September 2007

成人式 I photographed this in January in Osaka, Japan. But the second step of this project has been to create an artificial background to the 12 selected portraits. It’s like if each of the young women would have been photographed in a studio, with one of these painted background. These images will be presented soon in Osaka and also in Brussel, at the Brussel Art fair, as a one man show. But what you see, finally, is not the definitive image. Each image is also the base of a collage. It’s the first time, I work like this, and it’s been a complete different organization, with a close collaboration with two graphic designers. Soon, the complete series will be online, with its collage.