Why the nude?
During the first fifteen years of my work as a photographer, I basically photographed the inanimate: landscapes, micro-landscapes, architecture, found or composed still lifes, materials, structures. Then two things happened almost simultaneously in the early 1980s: the birth of my son Aurélien and taking an image in my garden which Jean Arrouye called Mother Goddess, and which is a metaphorical representation of the female body. I was not aware of the metaphor at the moment of taking the photograph.
These two events, for different reasons, made me want to photograph living beings. I started photographing my son, vowing at his birth to publish a book for his twentieth birthday (which I did).
In parallel to portraiture, I also decided to photograph female nudes. As a newcomer in the field, I had a rough start, but encountering Liliane (a friend of a friend), who like me was a rookie, enabled me to make my first images.
Pierre-Jean Amar – Février 2016
