Size: 2m20/60cm.
Text below the picture.
All together, all different.
The history spells, passes by, and leaves its indelible mark.
Time flies but Manichaeism never grows tired.
Each positions, each looks, each listens, each joins, refutes, understands, wonders, opts for a point of view.
Parts of this history are remembered and can gather men or oppose them or even tear them apart.
Man marks the History, man creates the History.
Photography often captures this man’s portrait actor of time.
Famous names from History are for all of us people apart, different form us.
Scientists, politicians, musicians, artists, are all marginalized, isolated because exceptional.
In this “Photo booth” project the aim is to pay a tribute to some of these men and women who have left an indelible trace all over the 20th century.
They are the testimony of pacifist actions and undertook in actions which appeared to them as right and above all human.
Therefore, their first goal of this series was to honour them for their actions and for their life devoted to peace, freedom and spirituality.
Wool is used on purpose. It allows separating them from the stand with an effect of foreground. They stand out from the background to reach their shape.
This set of relief allows highlighting them using a quaint and meticulous technique. This technique of sewn wool allows displaying their features gradually without possible review. The wool can’t be covered, can be sorely be untied and leaves an indelible trace on the canvas, pierces it, covers it.
With a side light, a changeable set of shadows appears which allows making each of the characters live according to the way of lighting, even to liven them up.
The character only is woollen, the frame must be separated from it opts for the colour codes and neutrality related to the technique of the silver photo booth. 4 different poses, black borders, sober background.
The change of scale also plays an important role. The classic size of the photo booth picture is exaggerated, pushed to its paroxysm in order to transform it into a gigantic picture able of being massive on a wall quite as mush as each of these respectable people knew how to leave a mark in history.
So, the initiative is partially to pay tribute to these personalities but also, paradoxically, to place them in a situation of «neutral everyday life”.
All these personalities were or are still in the spot light are published in newspapers, can be watched on the television.
The photo booth is tool of creation of popular images and is very wide-spread, easily accessible by all, used for administrative, personal purposes, useful, handful, necessity or pleasure.
That is why my approach, by means of this technique of the photo booth is to make these holy men somehow closer to us, although their messages inevitably want to be close to ” the Man “.
This means we are or were spectators of their action, their kindness, their division. Their virtues are considerable thanks to the celebrity which they have gained. This series tends to want to break the wall and distance between famous personalities and common people that we are.
In each of us can be found a good person, generous one, and have theses beautiful qualities which are not only for a world aside. At our level, actions and beneficent talks can be possible.
It is a kind of everyday acceptance of love, peace and a way of making virtues enter and make them easily applicable in everyday life, by opening our eyes to our surroundings, by showing total generosity. The essential thing is to make everyone create a better world and live in harmony with everything around.
Therefore, this series of photos made in a sewn wool photo booth way tends to make each of us sensitive on all the inspiration that each of these famous people can bring to our everyday life.