Can you introduce yourself: age, background?

I’m 24 years old, I grew up on the outskirts of Toulouse. As a child, I was very manual, needing to touch everything: playing with clay, observing nature and insects, colouring sheets of paper, painting the walls of my room, building objects out of cardboard, tinkering in the garage with my dad. Later, I studied Applied Arts to reflect on the forms, aesthetics and functions of the objects around us. My first contact with the arts was through objects and design. It is undoubtedly an approach that has remained with me. Two years ago, I graduated from a DNSEP art from isdaT in Toulouse where I built an approach to photography by insisting on process, manipulation and support.

When did you become interested in photography? How did your interest in it come about? Have you practiced, or studied, other artistic disciplines? Does this nourish your work?

It’s difficult to date the moment I became interested in photography, but I remember the discovery of a wonderful object: an Ektachrome sheet film. It was during a work session in the studio, on how to use of a camera, with my photography teachers, Françoise Goria and Christine Sibran. I was fascinated by its colours, its transparency, its luminosity, its fragility and its unique materiality.

The interest was built through the encounter with the history of this medium. For example: during my studies on the American pioneers, I was more fascinated by Pictorialism, the practice of photogrammetry and Richard Avedon’s photographs than by Straight Photography. The German school, especially in Düsseldorf, also influenced me considerably.

I was fortunate to learn in a school that encouraged an interdisciplinary approach

to art. The artists-teachers as well as the workshops of guest artists encouraged me

to experiment with several disciplines. I also worked with Morgane Tschiember and Émilie Pitoiset, who brought me a lot and allowed me to develop my photographic work in space, and to ask myself questions about its deployment as an installation.

Do you consider yourself as a photographer? As an artist? As a visual artist?

I have been asking myself this question for a long time, being very hesitant about my status. I consider myself more of an artist than a photographer. I use the photographic medium, I question it, but my practice does not stop there. We often speak of a visual artist, and I think this term is very close to that of an artist, because the contemporary artists with whom this term is associated are often multidisciplinary, perhaps that’s where the nuance comes in.

Do you think it’s wise to talk about abstraction in photography? (I remember this sentence: «There is no such thing as abstract photography, the image always draws its source from the world around us» in the presentation of an abstract photography exhibition at the BNF).

I believe that it is possible to talk about abstraction in photography, but that it is difficult to talk about Abstract Photography. I don’t quite agree with this sentence from the exhibition at the BNF, from what I understand from it: since the image always draws its source from the world around us, no photograph is abstract. I consider that all photography is precisely an abstraction, an abstraction of reality, whether it represents a subject or not. What do you think about this?

In fact, we have to distinguish between a process of abstraction, that is to say

the extraction of a subject from the real world, which we sometimes tear out, which we sometimes simplify, and this is the hallmark of photography (Philippe Dubois spoke of spatial and temporal cutting) and the term «abstraction», which is assimilated to non- figuration, to the fact of not representing a recognizable object. It is on this last meaning that I have essentially based myself to talk about abstract photography. By the way, how would you define photography? How would you explain it to someone who has never heard of it? What would be, for you, its characteristics, its essential qualities?

I will try to explain the word itself: Photography. Beginning with its Latin prefix photo: which comes from light, clarity. And its Latin suffix graphein: which writes, paints or draws, engraves, enshrines. We could then define it literally as writing with light or engraving light. Light is a physical phenomenon, a radiation.

Photography can be used with several tools (optical appartus, chemistry...) to fix this radiation on a support (sensitive papers; silvers film, digital sensors...). From there everthing is possible.

Regarding your work in particular, how would you present it in a general way? What would be the themes, the general orientations?

I define my work as an approach to photography that emphasizes the process, the digital manipulation and the physical medium. I use unconventional processes

as well as an overabundance of images that erases the representation of the subject. With these notions, I try to promote analysis and thoughts on the images, because they are everywhere. I have taken a phrase from Carol Squiers, curator of the exhibition What is a Photoghraph: «Although digital photography seems to have made analog obsolete, artists continue to create works that are photographic objects, using both old and new technologies, blurring boundaries and mixing techniques. »

My practice echoes this. I usually work from my personal archives, silver or digital photographs, which I use as a resource. The process is at the centre of my work. Learning by doing is of decisive importance. I oscillate between an experimental, subjective and intuitive studio process, trying to create a space between reality and its double. I try to reconsider and rethink the role of light, colour, composition, materiality, and subject. My photographs are more constructed than taken, they are the result of a process, of gestures, which are often the subject of the work.

I go through multiple stages before arriving at the final piece. For example, I may start by scanning one of my own silver photographs to play with, manipulate it with Photoshop (erasing, selective color correction, area duplication, area cutting, and area rearrangement). Sometimes, I use the scanner as a digital photosensitive paper and compose directly with different materials on the frosted glass.

Afterwards, I can digitally print this manipulated image in a large format on silver paper. I can erase and blur the prints with chemicals or by physical processes such as sanding. This creates fugitive images that fade until they disappear. The referent of the image is erased under my interventions and digital retouching. I try to distance myself from photography and the notion of representation. Each image becomes a unique piece. There is a performative aspect to this process in that the images were created and then destroyed. I want my work to produce new possibilities where the destruction, through the act of erasing, is constructive and positive.

Certain themes, certain approaches, may be common to all your work, but there

are undoubtedly differences, divergences? Would it make sense to establish «large sets» to categorize your different works? One might think, for example, that ultralight and écorce have a slightly different approach than malléable or membrane souche.

Can you tell me more specifically about ultralight and écorce?

I include a particular attention to the materiality of the photographic surface, as a painter so to speak, as well as a singular engagement with the physical or digital medium of photography, as a sculptor would. I wish to create a space where these media are intertwined. For example, écorce where the surface of the paper is over- sanded, tortured, torn, erased, my destructive gesture, which dissects the layers of paper, becomes creative in a delicate balance. Between fragility, flexibility of the paper but also almost transparency of the material which melts into the white of the wall. For ultralight, which is one of my latest series, the silver paper reacts to the cleaning and sanitizing chemistry of bleach. Its layers of colors are separated under my actions. These pieces are apprehended as a painting, so to speak.

While with malléable and membrane souche, I grasped them like a sculptor. But each piece is a frozen residue of time from the moment my gesture stopped.