Concepts

Historical

It would have been beyond Daguerre and Niepce ’s imagination a hundred years ago to think that their inventions would go through a tremendous and crazy evolution.

Their genius found later on with Eastman Kodak an ally to make photography a means of communication within everyone’s reach.

Evolutionary

In the past ten years, man has demonstrated his incredible ability in promoting his individuality in all his undertakings.

With a snap of the fingers, he commands a large number of sophisticated devices. The lighting in his loft responds to the inflections of his voice. And when his eye tires of his high definition television, he ends up getting lost in the maze of the wildest video games.

He has the world in the palm of his hand and obedience – either way – is the keyword.

Communicational

« Within reach at any time and anywhere », this is the motto of the urban warrior, of the countryside samurai, because even the forests or the fields with their green and soothing attraction cannot challenge any longer the hurried will of man putting communication aerials everywhere.

Revolutionary

The cell phone has caused a gigantic landslide. It destroys and creates. It aspires everything like a black hole swallowing all change-reluctant witnesses. It is an eight centimeter by three revolution.

Revolution in technology, society, fashion, bragging, … Everything gets caught under this steamroller of eighty-five grammes!

And photography, and music, and video, and television …

Photographic

Teenagers, businessmen and women alike, who has ever resisted the urge to freeze one particular moment of their lives in this tiny bit of integrated circuits ?

Advertisers jumped on the band wagon, understanding the considerable profit of such a monstrous milk cow.

And everybody has become a photographer. Rather, everybody takes photographs.

But Mr and Mrs Smith cannot make the difference between a shot taken by Cartier – Bresson and that of Aunt Shelley on the celebration of her grandson’s birthday.

This is admittedly a caricature but our society favours the loss of milestones in many fields, not only in photography.

Déjà vu

Every topic has already been studied : landscapes, nudes, macrophotography, … And the same poses, the same sunsets, the same bums come along again and gain.

So far, nothing new. But asking oneself why photographer A was preferred to photographer B in a photographic contest for just about the same shot means starting to question the whole system, and also the jury that awarded the prize. And this is exactly the point : the professional’s eye enters the realms of doubt.

Interactive and tridimensional – My vision of Photography

« Flat photography is boring » Uttering this statement was an easy thing for me to do but is not sufficient in itself: there is something to be done, but what ?

Photography must stand out of everything else. It must become part of our everyday reality though in a diverted way, in order to deliver a message.

It can be touched, modified, transformed: it gets in interaction with the public.

It takes on new proportions: it moves in space by becoming tridimensional.

Its founding principle is « Forbidden not to touch ».

In other words, it gets (back) to life.

Why on earth did I choose to call my website “antiphotography” ?

My vision of Photography may be insolent, rude, provocative, even disturbing, because it goes right into sensitive spots of society and the human soul.

It delivers a message that is neither gratuitous nor voyeur.

It enhances open-mindedness, which in turn favours tolerance and respect.

And opening minds means above all opening eyes, which many photographers and jurys keep desperately shut.