After the Maison de la Photographie Robert Doisneau and the Binôme Gallery, which first hosted the two exhibitions in 2015, Franck Landron returns with the two exhibitions to Brussels, with a book of self-portraits.
The images Franck Landron has been taking all his life are about constant movement. A selection of about thirty are now on view at the bookshop and gallery Hors Format in Brussels. A compulsive photographer from his early teens, Landron discounted no space, moment, or circumstance in what would soon turn into a photographic addiction. Ex Time, the exhibition and the book, is a chronological exploration of a life inextricably tied to images. Landron’s oeuvre is a perpetual oscillation between recurrent themes, places, and people: his family, his father’s car workshop, car repair, their house in Auvergne, friends, parties, girls, the cinema…
In 1971 Franck Landron was 13. His parents gave him a Canon FT QL, a single-lens reflex camera. He began taking snapshots of his schoolmates “trying not to get nabbed by the teachers.” Thus the copious and intimate collection of images began as a game. Over the first years, Landron refined his photographic language, his sense of framing, his taste for experimentation: these were the instinctive first steps in a personal and professional life devoted to creation and narration, with photography as a witness and a driving force.
We get to share in his loyal friendships and intense moments of complicity and transgression. The audacity of the early attempts is coupled with a sprightly revolt in images from his late teens, when he was studying architecture. There is also no lack of humor and freshness in his pictures. For Franck Landron, photography is a site of playfulness, challenge, and experimentation, both joyful and rebellious. He also shows a taste for iconoclasm far from the classical rules of composition.
Self-portraits punctuate this photographic journey which starts in 1971 and never ends. We see Franck Landron grow up and mature surrounded by his gang of friends. They are all reunited in an artist’s book entitled Ghosts. For the occasion, Loft Photo hosts an original exhibition-installation focusing on self-portraits, memory, and time.
Sophie Bernard
Fanck Landron, Ex Time
February 17 to March 26, 2017
Librairie Galerie Hors Format
Chaussée d’Alsemberg, 142
1060 Bruxelles
Belgium
www.horsformat.com
Fanck Landron, Ghosts
February 19 to April 2, 2017
Loft Photo
Rue Foppens, 8
1070 Bruxelles
Belgium
www.loftphoto.eu
