Cendrine Genin is an art photographer. She lives in Lyon. Studied Photography and philosophy . She creates in the space between the visible and the invisible. To be far enough away to say but close enough to touch. To slip between the immense and the infinitesimally small.
What do you photograph?
What I see for the first time.
What is your work intended for?
For the resonance of the meeting . For the Other. Otherness is an integral part of creation.
Why work on short series?
Life is short. I’m searching. Each image is breath, respiration. My feeling is inherent to my life, how is one to know what is going to be first in the framework, the emotion or the material. That does not imply any notion of temporality… Today I am learning to let time infiltrate my images. I like the idea that you can be free from the duration of time, it’s always about the same way of looking, about the same continuous gesture , between the upstroke and downstroke. Like a thread stretched on an invisible line.
Your photographs seem timeless, what are you trying to convey?
Instinctively? A point of view. A look at beauty and the flaws of living being. Then…The disappearance is part of my search, so I can only convey that I don’t know. What appears is done without me, doesn’t belong to me, it’s a piece of the unknown, it touches infinity. The other can then take hold of the open space.
Is your photography political, why?
I definitely chose the dignity of the gaze, that of the being. The word commitment suits me if it doesn’t evoke the claim but rather the freedom to be oneself, freedom itself. What disrupts this value engages me as a human being.
What period would you have liked to photograph?
Here and now. My elsewhere have neither time nor place.
Why did you chose this medium?
Photography chose me. I’m also an artist, and in both cases, it is about a writing with the texture of light. With painting, photography is what most comes closer to the moment. Like the hand, what the eye captures is a matter of suddenly appearing, of swinging between presence and absence. And sometimes… grace.
The photograph that you haven’t yet taken?
A silence.
