There are two cities, strangers, friends and even a self-portrait that slipped into the reflection of a shop window or in filigree throughout this photographic series. It is the self-portrait of an era, of youth, of a quest.
I found it interesting to combine these different subjects: the architecture of the city and that of young people often putting on a performance, the inside, the outside, the street and its passers-by, the night, the day or the intimate sphere.
In a way, these two cities correspond, question and answer each other. They say the same thing: wandering, vacancy, and sometimes suspense.
If the photography is indexical one can also distinguish in the images of Julien Selleron a topology.
Everything is not very clear, some images are fuzzy, but it’s in the order of memory … And that’s what makes them sensitive.
Julia Fabry – Exhibition curator
At the time, I was a naughty boy, I had completely dropped out of school, repeating a 3rd at the College Champollion Grenoble with disastrous result. To get out of this slump, my mother, at the end of her rope, enrolled me for vocational qualification. A toy store in the city center was looking for an apprentice salesman. I took the job for two years.
My father practiced photography as an informed amateur. One day when I went on holiday at home, my parents being separated, he lent me a camera. It was a “click” and on my return to Grenoble, I bought with my first apprentice pay a Russian camera, a Lubitel. A solid medium format but with complicated focus and random adjustment requiring a hand cell. On the way to work was in a tiny shopping arcade, a photographic laboratory run by a woman, Martine. I dropped my film there and the wait for my contact sheet the next day carried me all day long.
I had kept some friendships from my college years. It was the great time of the New Wave, and we met in the evening to listen to The Cure, The Smiths, Joy Division or Bowie around the boom box. No internet, no computer, just taking pictures, instinctively, to tell the daily life of late adolescence. We tried to escape the monotony of everyday life and photography led to other friendships. The camera had become a companion and also a way to overcome my shyness to approach the girls. Then came the purchase of the first 24X36, a Pentax and optics, 50mm, 35mm, 80mm. Photographing to escape the real life where in the store my occupation was most often wiping boxes of models or sweeping the yard.
After my exam I enrolled at the Lycée Autogéré de Paris, which I had heard of in the hope of obtaining my high school diploma. At 18, I left the family bosom and moved into a maid’s room, Place Saint Jacques, in the 14th in Paris. It was the first year of freedom in every sense of the word. I worked nearby to pay for these studies, not being forced to go to the school, I went there very little. I was dropped in the big city and I clung to my camera with always this instinct to document my daily life. New city, new friends, my first lover, but at the bottom also a great solitude where everything had to be built.
Photography had become a reflex, a companion, a way, no doubt also to retain the time, to build a box to remember, with a way to look borrowed from the great masters, Willy Ronis, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Doisneau. But probably unconsciously. I found a picture of my room with a poster of Ronisin Grenoble, I had completely forgotten this picture.
All this work was behind me, I advanced in my job as a filmmaker without paying attention to all these images while continuing to take pictures. It was during my last film about my father, that I digitized all his negatives and I also took advantage of that opportunity to digitize mine. By plunging back into these dated images some from over 30 years ago has come the evidence to show them. And then, no doubt, the desire also of sharing. The producer of my latest film, Franck Landron also photographer encouraged me in this process. since my father was the enlightened photographer, it belonged to him, for me maybe there was a taboo to transgress, to allow me that.
Julien Selleron
Julien Selleron – Grenoble / Paris, Années 1980 – 90
6 septembre – 21 septembre 2019
Galerie Simon Madeleine
7 rue des Gravilliers
75003 Paris
