“She loves sun, Shakespeare, beauty of beings and places, comedy, tragedy, Commedia Dell’Arte. She hates justice, stupidity, pretension. Who is she? You have certainly guessed; it is Ariane Mnouchkine. I’ve known her since we were 17. She was not yet a theater director and I was not yet a photographer. She established Le Theatre du Soleil, and I wanted to be a part of it. I didn’t know how to act though, so I found another role: being a photographer. My first photographs were all about theater. Then little by little I felt that I wanted to photograph what was happening in real life. I always say to young photographers that theater is a good training ground because it is one of the only places where a scene or an event repeats itself and where we have the chance to reshoot a photo for we can predict the following scene. It is really the best school, I think, to learn photography.”
Martine Franck
