Stephane Gizard works as a portrait photographer – shooting celebrities and unknowns – and is best-known for his “Modern Lovers”, a series of portraits of young people. The photographer’s benevolent eye captures the beauty and fragility of his models, revealing their sensuality and hinting at an expression of inner truth or at least some serious soul-searching.
In LIKE ME, Gizard takes a polyphonic approach to the notion of portrait, astutely inviting a more malleable interpretation of this authoritative photographic genre. It is a journey in two parts, the first side featuring scarred arms, tattooed backs, fragments of bodies, faceless silhouettes and heads with no bodies. It then carries on with a series of diptychs confronting the models’ own vision of themselves with the photographer’s portrait. On the left of the diptych we have the subject’s own interpretation: the model uses an iPad in selfie mode to compose the image, adjusting their pose and expression. When they are ready, they get Stéphane Gizard to press the shutter button and take their picture. On the right of the diptych, the photographer guides the subject to produce his own image, making his own choices. The two portraits thus strike a delicate balance, wavering between subtle differences and more glaring contrasts. Through this approach, Stéphane Gizard questions the way in which portraits and self-portraits – or “selfies” as we now call them in the smartphone age – are composed. It is all about our tendency for mimetism offset by our need to stand out or indeed our need to be desired. LIKE ME questions contemporary identity, amplified by social media, a fluctuating, multi-fold identity, oscillating between narcissism and detachment.
EXHIBITION
Like me by Stéphane Giazrd
09.09.2015 – 31.10.2015
5/7 Rue de Fourcy
75004 Paris
France
01 44 78 75 00
