The Young Creatives
This project is an intimate, personal experience. Through these portraits of students, I speak a little about myself, and my experiences… And then, one day, it came to me. They were there, at ECAL, the School of Art in Lausanne, and I wanted to sublimate them.
The series of young creatives contains a hundred portraits of up and coming artists. I wanted to immortalize this fragment of existence, to stop time. For some, these school years will be just a rite of passage, and for others, it marks a detour, or even a turning point.
It was difficult. One hundred portraits – all these faces – it was first and foremost about sharing, and an exchange that requires a lot of energy. When you’re dealing with fatigue, it is much more difficult to obtain an image… You have to seize the moment violently and live in it. It’s a gift, in the sense that we must be receptive.
Each student forms part of the mosaic, a piece of one puzzle whose fresco lasts between five and twenty minutes. I photographed them as if they have already succeeded.
The discipline mentioned in the photographs is important, because it reveals a nascent desire, and an aspiration that is immortalized at the time of the portrait. This echoes my own history, hesitations, and wanderings… It’s like borrowing one thing in order to give preference to another. Sometimes conventional and sometimes creative, I’ve never ceased to surpass myself, in short, to fight an inner combat.
To please my father, I was trained in electronics, and was obliged to continue my studies at the School of Engineering. I thus has to secretly enroll in an art school. At the risk of displeasing him, I first oriented myself towards industrial design. Then, very quickly, I moved into graphics and finally photography. I had found an outlet for expression and I became an Arte !
I have always found it difficult to find the right words. The right tone. These memories touch me, I feel deep empathy for them and some- times even, admiration for these students.
Today I am a professor. The love for my comrades has changed into a deep desire to convey. I think that this series of portraits is a way to pay tribute to these students, not so much to their future, but to their metamorphoses themselves…
A website was created only for this project :
http://the-young-creatives.com
If you want to buy the book, please send me an email.