I always liked images because they make me melancholy and reassure me, they bring me back to lost childhood, to time past, to the happy days. The reward in school was big or small pictures.
A motorway service area in August on a road in Italy, through the window of my father’s white R16, I furtively perceived a sad circus with 2 old elephants drinkig next to a red and yellow circus tent. I remember the serious and frozen look of Martine Carol in Lola Montès.
I watched the landscape of the countryside pass by the window of an old micheline, and I remember the tears held back by Catherine Deneuve on the platform of the Cherbourg station.
All these images, I wanted to keep them, dreamed or fantasized images, they help me to remember, to imagine my own scenarios, they seized the time that I wanted to capture.
Perhaps that’s why it’s obvious that I’ve been working in cinema for over 30 years and that I became director of photography. Cinema is the truth 24 times a second, says Jean-Luc Godard.
But with the photos, you have to know to keep only one, the one that alone concentrates the 23 missing. With a single image you can tell your own story, make your own staging.
Enthusiastic and spontaneous photographer, I always try to have a human, absurd and poetic angle on the subjects I photograph.
A successful photo is always a small victory.
It’s my first exhibition and today I’m happy to present you my gaze, for a moment, a captured time, I do not know when, I do not know where.
It’s stolen time.
Lionel Perrin
Lionel Perrin : Stolen time
March 16 – May 17, 2020
Opening May 11, 6 p.m. – 10 p.m.
The gallery is open by appointment until May 11
And every day from 11 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. until May 17
Little big gallery
45 rue Lepic
75018 Paris
