| “How can a person live in a photograph?” Capturing a person (clothes, environment, social codes) is not the aim, capturing a human being is. The nude is the path to something more primitive, more deep, more simple. In these photographs, nudity is part of a preparatory process: it takes away the reality of the person, reducing the model (person) to his essence (human being) and allowing the photographer to create something new, something altogether different. For the model (now a human being) to exist, he must be placed in a new reality system with different rules. He becomes a performer using his body as material. |  |
Stéphane Fugier
“How can a person live in a photograph?” Capturing a person (clothes, environment, social codes) is not the aim, capturing a human being is. The nude is the path to something more primitive, more deep, more simple. In these photographs, nudity is part of a preparatory process: it takes away the reality of the person, reducing the model (person) to his essence (human being) and allowing the photographer to create something new, something altogether different. For the model (now a human being) to exist, he must be placed in a new reality system with different rules. He becomes a performer using his body as material.
The function of black and white is to “undo” the last bits of the person’s and the environment’s reality. The elimination of color allows the new reality to be seen.
Subject to the installation, the model appears lost and out of his depth. He is now part of a narrative over which he has no control, neither over the action nor its meaning. He wanders in a space that either swallows him up or rejects him, sentencing him to indefinite transformations in search of the a place into which he knows he will not fit.
Unaware of the location, the elements, the length of and the idea behind the shoot, the model is destabilized and rendered fragile, imperfect. He is imprisoned in the present by the photographic lens and has no other choice except to exist in simplicity.
These photographs are not legends. The viewer sees what he wants to see, the context contracting and orienting the possibilities. There is no correct interpretation and nothing that must been seen or understood. The photographic experience (experiment) is first and foremost an encounter with a person. Photography is a closed cell that captures light and imprisons the present. Snatched up in this cell, if the human being wants to live he has no other choice except to exist in the simplest manner possible. Frightened or mocking eyes gaze at him as he faints, therefore losing his wish to fill us with wonder. Photographs are not legends; the spectator can see what he wants in them, the context can only contract and orient the possibilities. There is no right or wrong interpretation. Moreover, there is nothing to see or to understand if that is what one wishes.
