His name: Daniel Castonguay. He is Canadian. It has just been published in number 24 of the photographic magazine Openeye. We wanted to show you his images and this text.
Award-winning photographer Daniel Castonguay is a street photographer based in Montreal, Canada. He is among others, laureate of the ‘Fine Art photo of the year 2019’, at the prestigious MonoVisions Photography Awards in London. Daniel began photography in 1979 as an extracurricular activity and without completely putting aside his passion for photography, he pursued his studies and obtained in 1989, a Professional Electrical Engineering degree at “Université du Québec à Chicoutimi” in Canada.
Living in a great city, he was naturally driven to street photography and depicting quotidian life in its simplest form. When he started in this field of photography, he worked according to the established standards of the style and at a certain point, he got bored of not being able to illustrate the mood of the “moment”. In order to give a more authentic touch to his work, audacious and greatly influenced by the early 20th century pictorialist movement and artists such as Alfred Stieglitz, Robert Demachy and Léonard Misonne, he began to process his imagery to make it a little more mysterious. This had the effect of combining simple moments of life with his state of mind, ending up in a unique “creative street photography” style, hence the name of his series “Quotidian Life”.
A part of his work as a “creative street photographer” is to bring this daily life into a world of fantasy, something related to abstraction. This creates a duality, a paradox. The paradox of ordinary life in a universe that exists only in one’s own imagination that can literally be anything but still be able to relate to.
For Daniel, photography is a mode of expression in the same way as writing or playing music. Transmitting an emotion is the essence of his photographic work, bringing the viewer into a story. More specifically, to make the viewer travel in a world of reverie, leaving all the space to imagination.
As Daniel says, “Being a street photographer is above all playing a role in the urban life framework, contributing to its vivacity, its pace and almost belonging to a chaotic scenario. To me, street photography is more than a picture making business, it’s being part of a continuous theatrical sketch where I play the role of a silenced character.”
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