This is the shortest exhibition of the week.
3 days from today to Monday at the International Biennial of Photography in Epinal.
The author also sent us this text!
It was at the end of the sixties that I started to be interested by photography. Like many photographers at that time, the hours spent in darkrooms revealed this passion to me, which has never faded since. Over time, the images of great photographers influenced me, my approach to photography evolved, my vision was refined, my centers of interest became clearer.
Today, it is in the street that I seek my inspiration. Once I find it, I leave aside the illustrative photograph that I have just taken to transform it into a personal vision during the phase of post-processing and printing of the image in order to make an artistic version of it as I see it in my imagination.
Journey to the land of Ukiyo-e
It was upon returning from a trip to Japan that the idea for a series on this journey was born in 2020 at the very beginning of the pandemic. But how to present this trip without falling into the traditional photo of tourist guides. It was at this precise moment in my reflection that I began to imagine a common thread for my photographs. Ukiyo-e or more precisely Japanese prints.
Had not this graphic art remained for centuries the equivalent of our postcards bought by Japanese travelers to immortalize the resorts of their stays across the country?
It only remained for me to associate today’s Japan with its traditions anchored in the ancestral values of a society resolutely turned towards modernism and to mix the whole thing into a photographic patchwork by taking up the codes of the Ukiyo- e used by so many Japanese artists over the centuries.
Bernard Moncet
www.bernardmoncet.com
