REGARDS FRANÇAIS SUR L’EUROPE
Collective photographic exhibition organized by the french embassy in Dublin, Ireland, sept. 2008.
Exposition photographique collective organisée par l’Ambassade de France à Dublin, en Irlande, sept. 2008.
DPI MAGAZINE, TAIWAN
8-page interview with my photographic illustrations in DPI, taiwanese Art & Design magazine (in chinese), dec. 2006 – jan. 2007 :
INTERVIEW OF JEAN-MARIE BABONNEAU, PHOTOGRAPHER
by Lulu Tzeng, Editor at DPI Magazine, Taïwan, oct. 2006.
1. Could you introduce yourself to our readers, including your birthday, birthplace, education background, interests and working experience?
My name is Jean-Marie Babonneau, and it sounds a bit old-fashioned in French, nowadays. I was born in Bretagne, France in 1971. Then my parents moved to Germany where I spent 5 years of my childhood. I became early bilingual French-German. Learning to read and write German at school, I used this knowledge to learn reading French by myself with the popular Tintin comics. I was a rather solitary daydreaming child. I found recently again a 2-page comic that I had made at the age of 13. I studied at a scientific high school, because I thought I wanted to become an inventor building robots. I thought it was very romantic! Then I experienced my first love with a young female artist, which allowed the rediscovery of the artist in myself. I have always loved to draw and write. First I shared my art with some beloved women, the ones who were my girlfriends back then, now I rather share my art with an audience. Heart-broken in 1991, I passed successfully the admission at the Art Academy of Nantes, France, and got my Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1995, with mainly photography and the congratulations from the jury. I decided to deepen my practice of photography and, in 1996, I passed successfully the admission at the French National School of Photography, in Arles, where I got my Master of Photography, in 1999. Meanwhile I had found a job as black & white printer for Lucien Clergue, renowned French photographer, who created in Arles, one of the first international photography festivals in the world, Les Rencontres de la Photographie, in 1969. I was doing art-prints of his works to be exhibited and sold in American art-galleries from his vintage negatives with portraits of Pablo Picasso and Jean Cocteau, and series of nude-photographs. Then I met a young and beautiful Icelandic woman in 1998, we fell in love, and so I moved to her island when my studies were over. I lived 3 years in Reykjavik, Iceland, 1999-2002, where I started as professional photographer and artist. In 2001, I meet and interview famous fashion photographer Peter Lindbergh, and I make my first animation short-movie “The Comet Night”. I exhibit my art-projects at several cultural events, including photography book prototypes, projections and installations. Now I have been living 4 years in Denmark, since 2002. I speak 4 languages, French, English, Danish, German. I am 35 years old and I work both as art photographer, assigned photographer, art director and photography teacher doing workshops in art schools. I think that artistic collaborations can be developed more between Asia and Europe, so in the future, I would love to work on an art-project in Asia with Asian artists.
2. How did you get started as a photographer? And who influenced you very much?
The decisive trigger to become an artist has been my first love when I was 18. By the age of 13, I wanted to become a comics-drawer, and I was reading a lot of them with superheroes and other science-fiction stories. As teenager, I was dreaming of becoming an inventor making all kinds of possible robots. As I entered the art-academy, at the age of 20, like many other applicants, I wanted to become a painter. It is only when I got my second photography teacher, who managed to get me interested, that I realized the huge potential of photography, and of mechanically-made pictures, so my passion started!
I rediscovered by myself the technique of long-exposure and light-painting, before discovering other photographers who had used this way of “writing with light” (which is the Greek etymological origin and the meaning of the word “photography”). So I was able to paint with light. It is only slowly that I began making sense with my pictures, and making series of photographs, like words in a sentence, and sentences making a story to send a personal message to appeal to others.
3. What do you remember most about the early days of your career? What was the big turning point in your career?
When we are talking about career, it is still quite recently that I started as professional photographer. It’s about 7 years now. But I began expressing myself with photography in 1993, so it’s 13 years now. I remember the excitement of arriving to Iceland in 1999, to start a new phase in my life. It was the unknown, I was finished with my long art studies, and I had to re-invent myself in a new social context. I learned a lot from this experience and got new influences. In Iceland, they are so isolated, that they keep obsessively informed about all what is going on in the world, and especially about the new trends in art and fashion. They are always up-to-date, and know about the latest cutting-edge music or even the most unknown underground filmmaker from the 80’s. After having worked as photographer for several musical and cultural magazines, and meeting through these portrait-sessions many Icelandic artists, I have become friends with few of them. An Icelandic photographer and graphic designer, for example inspired me alternative ways of working with pictures and graphics on a computer, and I began making my own websites, and even making short animations with my still-pictures. Through my assignments, I came to scan my films and work more and more with a computer. Then came digital cameras, which offered lower resolution than analogical pictures, but allowed me to experiment very spontaneously. After a period of playing with much graphics, I came back to using digital image-correction with more sobriety, like I used to do in a darkroom: contrast, density, color-grading, balancing the composition with the help of masks. The turning-points in my life have been through meetings with strong personalities, artists exhibited either in museums or galleries, some artists whom I personally met, and the few women I loved.
4. What emphasis you will consider when you take photography for fashion? What is your opinion of fashion?
Fashion uses images for its promotion. The adjectives “fashionable” and “trendy” sound difficult for the artist in me, because an artist wants to have a unique artistic expression, which has nothing to do with trends. As an visual artist, you want to create your own visual universe, helped by your inevitable artistic influences, your life story bearing its scars, your sensibility, your critical approach to what the world now has to offer or to deny. Working for others is not always easy and sounds very abstract, and it is again the meeting with another artist, a designer, that will be the decisive moment. It is based on a common work with others. The human aspect is very important. You will often work with a whole team to make the pictures, like models, make-up artists, hairdressers, stylists, assistants. It is about production, and like a good filmmaker, you have to gather a team around your project. Especially people that you get along with, and trust for the quality of their professional skills. It is about dialog and trust, and I get the best results when I admire the work of the ones I work with, and I reciprocally get their respect for my pictures. To do good work, you need to be trusted.
And to be trusted, you need to first believe in yourself as a person, and as an artist. Then it is about being outgoing and meeting people. To conclude about fashion, I would say that many designers want to follow too closely the pictures they already saw in magazines, instead of trying something new and challenging, and creating pictures that will surprise their audience of potential new customers. Because they want to be remembered, they need to trust another artist, specialist in one’s own field. The other fashion photographers whose work I like, are often more art photographers working for fashion. Helmut Newton’s obsessive, mysterious and very sexual pictures evoke more than fashion, there is a life behind the pictures and beyond the promotion of clothes. Terry Richardson working with amateur snapshot cameras has brought something very fresh to the very posed and overdone fashion photographs, that we still are bombed with. He is closer to real life, because he doesn’t work so much in studios. German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans chose to not work with model-agencies but with his friends as models, and he gets an intimacy that you almost never can reach while working with an unknown model from an agency. Of course, you get to know some models little by little, but maybe never as good as your friends, whom you can ask maybe more from, because they know you and trust you. And it is also challenging the canons of beauty that many agencies tend to impose.
Visually, I have been influenced by the fairy-tales from my childhood, the science-fiction comics from my teens, the paintings from my history of art lessons, the films I watched, the book I read, the music I listened to. I like to create a certain twist in my pictures, so that you have to look twice to get the second meaning or underlying story, something that triggers the imagination, so that you want to cut the picture out from the magazine and hang it on your wall.
For me, fashion is not especially about pretty clothes and pretty faces, it is about telling a story. A story connected to reality, even to triviality. A story or a script sometimes written together with the designer, the stylist or another artist. I like to refer and transfigure something that everybody sees or has seen without paying attention into something remarkable and sometimes beautiful. As an artist, I think it is important to take inspiration from the real world around us. Art for the sake of art is dangerous and has no purpose. I like to publish my works in magazines, because not everybody goes to dedicated art-places, such as galleries and museums exhibiting contemporary art photography! After more than 160 years since photography’s invention, the older forms of art like painting or sculpture are still considered more easily as art than photography. People often believe that handcrafted art has more value because the work was made by hand, and often has taken more time to produce. A drawing made in 30 seconds can be better than a painting made in 10 days. It’s the originality of an artist’s vision that gives an artwork its interest. Although a photograph is taken in a fraction of a second, every time I press the button, it is years of experience, which help me to make my artistic choices and are concentrated in this one picture. Selecting the right pictures among 100 or 1000 others is also part of the creative process. All the process of making choices one after another builds up a corpus of original work. Even small decisions in everyday life can shape the future differently.
5. How do you catch a figure’s spirit, such as some artists and singers?
It is always a matter of dialog with another artist. Sometimes you have a very good chemistry with this other person, and you have time to talk and exchange opinions on art, on life, etc … But in this case, I’d rather talk afterwards, after the photos, there is a tension between a photographer and a model, that I like to catch, especially when your model only gives you little time because of a busy schedule, you have to work quick and intensely to catch the personality in front of you. You have to know your equipment well enough to forget about the technical part and be present, and make a visual contact to this other person, and not hide behind your camera. Then if you have an idea for a portrait, you’ll ask your model if he/she likes it. A portrait, a photograph of a person is not a photograph of a person. It is a photograph of the relationship between this person and the photographer. It is not only you in the picture. It is you and I. It is the result of a negotiation. Take the same model and 10 different photographers and you’ll get 10 different versions of the one model!
6. When it comes to art photography, will you start with a special idea? Will you use different photography skills?
For art photography, the difference is mainly that I will work more alone, because I am not responding to an assignment. From time to time I might work with models, it can be strangers in the street or a friend. Art is my inner exploration. It is introspective of my relation to the world, to my environment. As a French artist based in Denmark, I notice things that locals don’t and I photograph those things. I collect what I find surprising in my everyday life. Nevertheless, I will avoid taking the pictures I have seen too often. Otherwise my pictures could not surprise myself and the others anymore. I like more and more to find the beauty in the ugly or in the banal, the poetic in the trivial. Recently I took pictures of a charming friend, who unfortunately has a skin disease, and she invited me to follow her to the hospital treatment. It was very intense and although it would normally be considered as ugly, I managed to do beautiful pictures of her naked and vulnerable. Because there was trust and sincerity in both of us. When working with art, I will feel very free to mix different techniques, like drawings, computer graphics and writings along with my photographs. It has to be personal, intimate, mysterious sometimes, tricky, surprising, poetic and strangely harmonious, sometimes a bit chaotic too, in appearance, because I like to make people discover different levels in pictures, a hidden structure, a certain complexity like in real life. Art pictures cannot be too obvious like many promotional pictures, in which one message has to be clear: Buy it! I express myself best with series of pictures more than single pictures. The process of selecting and organizing the pictures together is a big deal of the creative process, after having recorded fragments of reality on a light-sensitive surface. I’d like to quote a sentence by Henry Miller: Whatever there be of progress in life comes not through adaptation but through daring, through obeying the blind urge.
7. There are some of your photos, which presented danish lifestyle and beautiful landscapes: how and when did you photograph them?
I think, that I present more of my personal vision of Denmark or Iceland on my website. It is a mix of documentary, posed and snapped pictures, my process of learning a foreign language and making mistakes and being corrected by my Danish teacher (it inspired me the design of my website) or friendly people I meet. It is a way to go back to school and give myself a new challenge. Because we are never finished learning and my experience of living in different foreign countries taught me that you better learn the local language if you want to really get to know the local people and understand their culture. People express their feelings best in their mother-tongue, so if you want to become intimate with some of them, you have to go through this learning process, without though forgetting your own identity, and where you come from. Although I can communicate with Danes in Danish now, we will remain different, I mean, rich of our differences, so that we get to know ourselves better through our differences and learn to live together. When you spend time in another country, you are allowed to photograph more intimately and discover the depth in the things that you live among. Things have a meaning that you could never have discovered as tourist only staying for a couple of weeks. As I was telling about the importance to communicate with your models, the fact of speaking your model’s mother-language will often make a dramatic difference in the resulting pictures. I believe in knowing your environment, as an alien eye.
8. When you take photographs to create a series of new works, how long is the process? What is the most difficult thing while you are working with photography?
I will probably spend most of my life before reaching the accomplishment in my art. New ideas come anytime, anywhere, at a café, in my bed, at work, in the shower, on a trip. When reading a book, listening to music, watching a film, almost anything can be a source of inspiration. The difficult part sometimes is to keep time for doing art, because my artistic inputs are vital to me to produce original assigned works, when needed. It’s feeding my imagination and keeping the engine going. I have to find time by myself to reflect, solitude is important to preserve so I get a clearer view of what I really want. When I know again, when I am loaded with new ideas, I can work with others again! And that can be fun again!
9. What is the most important thing for becoming a photographer?
I think that I answered this question previously because I can be very talkative, so I couldn’t wait until this question! Well, I would add that a photographer is just another artist, and when for example, the pianist plays piano, one doesn’t think of the notes and the technical exercises anymore, the pianist just plays and expresses oneself! It is the same with a camera. A photographer has to be a passionate and enthusiastic person, curious and self-critical, demanding and perseverant. In any case he/she has to be or become a great human being, because no camera can replace that. A camera is only a recording tool. Whatever equipment you use, the important is the human being behind the machine! The sharp eye telling a story!
10. Is there any artist, whom you admire very much? If yes, why?
I like any artist who confronts one’s own obsessions or fears, and tries to come with a visual solution. An artist with strong views is often an outsider, living at the edge of the society’s rules and norms to have enough distance to challenge them, and propose new perspectives and new horizons. It is not always on purpose that this person lives a bit differently, art can be a therapeutic way for finding a balance and mission in life, and find a way to be useful somehow to the others, but first to oneself. It is well known that you cannot love another, if you don’t love yourself a bit. The therapeutic way anyhow cannot be the purpose in itself for making art. Something more has to be shared with an audience! I like many kinds of artists: they can be writers, musicians, dancers, set designers, architects, filmmakers, visual artists or photographers. Artists with a philosophy, artists challenging my perception of the world, and my appreciation of art itself, are often my favorites. Whatever the technique they may use, if I recognize a great soul behind the work, then I fall in love! By the way, I’d like to learn more about artists from Taiwan and China! Will you invite me?
11. Could you describe your attitude to life? What inspires you in your daily life?
I found out that there is always two ways at looking at the same thing, a positive and a negative. It’s a matter of choice in the end. I try to be optimistic and see the positive energy in life. Many events in the world tend to disappoint me about the human kind, many wars, many conflicts, much oppression against freedom of speech and much manipulation to form the minds in a uniform direction, and I don’t know how to change that at my little human scale, and make it better. I try to be aware of my direct environment first, and see if I can sometimes help to make it a little bit better. Here I don’t talk as a photographer, but as a person. Making life a bit better can be as simple as helping a blind man to cross the street safely, or to find a door. Or to say: “excuse me”, or “thank you”, or say “this is beautiful”! If some of my pictures can make some people become more aware, or remind them of an old feeling, or get them a smile on their lips, then maybe, I have not come in vain to this life!
A selection of works by Jean-Marie Babonneau can be found on: www.betterworldinc.org
All pictures by Jean-Marie Babonneau /// Better_World_Inc.
All rights reserved © 2006
12. My little bibliography
At last, I recommend the reading of the following books or texts, they are about theory on art and photography, on medias, on culture and appropriation of space, and some strong novels that inspired me, so this is my little bibliography. Enjoy!
- Edward T. Hall, Beyond Culture. (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press, 1976).
- Edward T. Hall, The Hidden Dimension. (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1966).
- Marshall Mc Luhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (McGraw-Hill, 1964),
- Marshall Mc Luhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (University of Toronto Press, 1962),
- Marshall Mc Luhan, Processus and Media, (1977),
- Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936),
- Walter Benjamin, A Small History of Photography (1931, in One-Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott & Kingsley Shorter, London, Verso, 1985, pp. 240-257),
- Walter Benjamin, Short History of Photography, (1931, trans. by Phil Patton, in Artforum 15, 6, February, 1977, pp. 46-51),
- Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, (La Chambre claire, 1980),
- Gisèle Freund: Photography and Society (in French 1974, in English 1980),
- Henry Miller, Sexus (Book One of The Rosy Crucifixion), (Paris: Obelisk Press, 1949, re-edition ISBN: 0802151809, Grove Press, 1987),
- Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) – in English, ISBN: 0060932139, Harper Perennial Modern Classics; Reprint edition (1999),
- Paul Auster, Leviathan (1992).
PHOTOGRAPHIE.COM
Portfolio The Healer /// Le Guérisseur in www.photographie.com, july 2007 :
