While the weather apparently does not know yet if it should cold as hell or just Spring-like in Paris, the last month has been quite productive speaking of photography. First, the LA Collection show at Duncan Miller Gallery was quite a success. So was the presentation of the collection at Seoul, for the Pink Art Fair. And then, as the show ended, another black & white piece of mine was selected for another LA exhibit! This time, it was the 1650 Gallery, located in Echo Park, which had selected Smoke and Mirrors to be featured in their Dark Side exhibition!

 This show was rather on the short duration side, but I liked the swift submission process, so I’ll probably try to sumit works once more to their calls. Now, on the local side, a solo show made out of a short selection of my United States of A. pictures has opened last week in the renowned Sciences Po university here in Paris! Eight pieces are on display until Nov. 22nd, when we’ll have a celebratory drink for the closing. For those of you who have connections in Paris, I encourage you to let them know about the show, and invite them to the 22nd party.

It’s great being able to show those mostly recent images, as I have not returned lately to the USA and I am slowly feeling the need to be on the road again, taking more pictures. With the hanging done and show already open, I had a different look at the meaning of all this. Not only were the images about the US, but I knew I was missing something about the general lack of human presence in the shots, while just two of them represented, not figures, but rather silhouettes, like bare symbols. It became clear that these images were about the iconic United States, the cinematographic experience, the vision of an outsider, raised with films and TV shows, conscious of reality but obsessed with the dream. It became even funny to realize that this couple posing in front of Red Rock Canyon was just another mimicry the Las Vegas wedding; the kids and families on Santa Monica’s beach, the poor’s man Melting Pot.

 The next parisian exhibition will happen in 2012!

September is almost like New Year. As a kid, we all used to get back from summer holidays and start a new school year, and in countries where you have a decent number of holidays (think France), everybody is also coming back to the office by that time, making the business days even busier. Clubs reopen, restaurants too, TV shows start their newest season, even some religions have their New Year in September! In French, we call this time “la rentrée”.

As a rentrée gift, the “I LOVE LA” exhibition is being extended until October 1st. That means three weeks more to check out Summer Melody in the real world. Also, starting Sept. 22nd, the Duncan Miller Gallery will be attending the Pink Art Fair in Seoul, presenting some of the exhibition prints.
I have also published several pictures of Shanghai on Flickr, before transferring them to my portfolio.

Please check them out!

Lately, I have also returned from a trip to Tel-Aviv, Israel. There will be photos here soon. The food was so great! Now it’s time to try to focus on new photo projects, and maybe loose some weight along the way. Such a busy busy rentrée!

Last time, I wrote about the images I submitted to this photo contest which had Los Angeles city as a theme. Well, things went on pretty well since then as my Summer Melody photo (below) has been nominated to be part of the exhibition! Fourty-two photographers were selected for a total of fifty images, which were premiered yesterday (Thur 8/11) at the Wilshire Grand Hotel’s opening reception. The show will open offically tomorrow (Sat 8/13) at the Duncan Miller Gallery and stay on until mid-September.

The whole thing has really gained some momentum with articles being written in LA Times, Huffington Post, etc. The reception was part of the Downtown Art Walk too, something I had planned to do several times but always failed to. Anyway, I am really excited about this, and it’s too bad I could not attend the openings myself, but, as Daniel mentioned, the show is meant to travel, and I sincerely hope it will. How great would that be to bring it to Tokyo?!

Until then, the pieces of art on display are for sale, and the three most popular works will be rewarded with prizes. Part of the popularity will be measured by attendees reaction, while the usual Facebook ‘Like’ will count as one fourth of total fame. Works featured at the show can be viewed on the dedicated page, which you have to ‘Like’ before ‘Liking’ a specific photo. Here’s the direct link to my piece.

Talk to you soon for the results!

A month ago I submitted my entry for the “I Love LA” photo contest, hosted by the Duncan Miller Gallery in Los Angeles. A short while ago, Los Angeles Magazine randomly picked some entries to illustrate an article about the contest: I was thrilled to see one of my photos featured!

Contest is closed now and we are all waiting for the results. The winners will be featured in a collective exhibition at the Duncan Miller Gallery! Fingers crossed!

Today I spent my time walking the corridors of Le Louvre, though being Tuesday, it is closed to the public.

A close friend of ours is making a film about Alexander the Great, and he has been shooting inside the museum, interviewing curators and Macedonia experts. I got to sneak in to take pictures of the shooting…

It’s a great feeling to be in such a place without anyone clogging the rooms, being loud or preventing you from looking closely at the works displayed. Being in a museum takes a totally different meaning.
You actually realize many people enjoy this time to do some work: cleaning, studying the pieces of art, doing some preventive curation, etc. I wasn’t expecting so many people on site.

To be clear, I probably encountered 10 people, which is particularly small compared to the hordes of tourists going in each day. I’ll try to upload some of those pictures pretty soon.

EDIT: Hmm, thanks to one of the friends mentioned below, I actually realized I had made a big mistake. ごめんね！We did see Brennan Green (XLR8R podcast) at Metro, Kyôto, Japan, not Green Velvet. Though, the music/video is really worth it, please check it out!

Here is the video of a song called Let Go, by The Japanese Popstars (iTunes) (via Arte Creative). Green Velvet is apparently doing the vocals… The last time I heard about that guy, he was actually DJing in front of me at Metro, that nice little club of Kyôto. That was in 2006, my third trip to Japan, right during 花見: with two of my best friends we decided to travel to Japan and visit the country. It is a very happy memory for me and reading the name of Green Velvet definitely brings back memories! I remember seeing this white dude I had never heard of before, though famous enough to get a tour in Japan and an actual date at Metro. It was only when I got back home that I learnt about him…

Today, after discovering the video (which is quite nice by the way, the animation shows clear references to ghostly faces the Japanese culture made me familiar with), I tried to know more about The Japanese Popstars, and I must say what I’m listening to at the moment is quite good. I just bought their We Just Are LP and that’s some good techno/punchy/fusion/whatever.

That’s the clear win of the day!

Hey CexWork readers!

A whole week full of glorious news has just passed. First, having booked my tickets to Raphael Saadiq in Paris, I was forwarded the lineup to the upcoming Coachella festival. Damn those VIP sold out fast! And now it seems they also ran out of tent space. Hmm, will it be another year without Coachella for me? Might well be. Though in the near future I will going to Las Vegas for business. Vegas, business, maybe an awkward association, though in my case this is for real.

I’ll be sure taking photos of the desert, and that’s why I chose to drive from LA instead of landing at McCarran International. More on that soon.

Not totally unrelated is my new Polaroid EE 100 I received just in time with the shipment of Fuji FP-100C. As weather had been mostly cloudy in Paris, I could not make a lot of test shots, but in case you’re wondering, yes, this little thing is bound to Vegas too! I also got a whole refill of Instax Wide, which means that I’m ready for Spring to come. A moi les ciels bleus, le chatoiement du printemps et des fleurs nouvelles écloses !

Although much of my work is shot using a digital camera, I started photography with an analog camera, using film. I was attracted first to black & white films, and low light conditions, thus experiencing with rolls of TRI-X, HP5 and their respective flexibility. I enjoyed grainy shots pushed 3 stops during processing. At that time I was obsessed with architecture and trying to understand how to make a ‘good’ shot.

Though years passed and digital distracted me from seeking those artifacts in my photos, I never really stopped using analog cameras. A Yashica T4 super (which unfortunately got broken after some muggers thought it was a digital one), then Rollei XF35, then Konica BM-201, then Slim Devil, then Yashica MF35… They were perfectly fitting my need for street photography, visiting various cities in the world and wanting to carry only lightweight hardware. Film had the edge, the defaults, the errors, the colors which fed my attraction for the medium. For some time, I had been stocking the photos taken in a dedicate set, which I thought would be an interesting project to exhibit. Later on, I realized I had too many occurrences of certain cities in the set, while some images I was discarding for the sake of limited selection were also worth exhibiting.

The initial idea evolved quite naturally toward this ‘Analog cities’ series. A couple of weeks ago I released chapter zero, featuring Montreal and Paris. I was flattered when Cexwork featured me in the news section, and the overall reaction from friends and visitors made me realize this was something worth pursuing. I have now a whole folder for each city, full of material that goes even back to 2006! Tokyo, Paris, LA, Montreal, Vancouver, Brussels, San Francisco, Kyoto, those are some destinations I traveled to and which will be part of the series. Until then, chapter one is already available: Los Angeles & Santa Barbara!