So, hey! let’s try some flashes… what do you got?… Quantum Q5D… but this one was taken using a reflector, the only light being the one from the ceiling, I’d shift the color balance so it looked like, say… maybe Olivier Roller, whom I’d fancy quite a lot at the time?
October 2008, I was just starting my career as a photographer…
And the time passes on… already 4 years ago, and that wasn’t the first time we met… Mathias aka The Burning Hell and his bandmates touring Europe in 2008… I was looking for whatever-image-I-don’t-remember and I just saw this one! I was with two of those guys a few weeks ago when The Burning Hell actually decided they were up to a 24h World Record… Filming them rather than photographing them… but Mathias had kept his childish look.
(Source: antoinedoyen.photoshelter.com)
Yes, it is actually something I had forgotten… shooting Ryan Gosling at the Cannes Film Festival in 2010. And today, I received an email from Contour saying this had been published… A very nice surprise after a boring day…
Cover of Ryan Gosling by Antoine Doyen for ARENA Homme + Magazine , April 2012 issue in Korea.
Ryan Gosling by Antoine Doyen / Contour by Getty Images
Dec. 2009, a bar in the Arts & Métiers area, Paris… This photo, I don’t even know how it appeared on my personal laptop! like, raw files, not even renamed, in a folder I didn’t even remember moving… a folder I discovered while updating an lightroom catalog.
So, there we are again, two and a half year ago… in a bar. Meeting with fellow photographers, some I’d met at the photojournalism school, others I’d met at the Cannes Film Festival…
Talking about photo (in general), prospection, (not-) working, whatever, it’s eight o’clock. Getting our shit together, so we can move forward in a business… Many a thing has changed since that photo, yet all of them are still professional photographers – which isn’t that easy those days!
We still meet from time to time on a Wednesday morning: this is le café du mercredi matin.
Yesterday, Julien, a former assistant, came to my office so he could shoot my face with his Mamiya then ask me a few questions… “Could you tell me about some photo you’d forgotten?” Quite frankly, I had no clue which one I could talk about!
Then it hit me while browsing my photo catalog: this portrait of René Vautier, whom I met at an African Films Festival in Brussels, “Afrique Taille XL”. He was showing his movie, “Afrique 50”, a classic you should watch, by the way: http://youtu.be/vb3DkggPtaQ
This portrait makes sense, for it is quite representative of both my work now and the difficulties a portrait photographer encounters from time to time… Back in 2005, I went to West Africa to shoot a story about the African cinematography, although I really wasn’t too good as a photographer… it became my first school of photography. Then, when I met the guy, I was a bit more experienced but the setup was even tougher: harsh lights, the context of a festival… I had only a reflector and my wife.
Read more about it on Julien’s blog… in French:
http://www.blog.julienpaquin.com/2012/05/04/linvite-du-vendredi-4-mai-2012/
Circa 2008, when I was a student at the EMI-CFD… some other students reading a contact sheet.
This picture and its film has just been processed… Found it, hum… where? Maybe in my drawer, handed it to Valérie, she was going to her lab, I thought it’d be cool to finally know what was inside… EMI-CFD times, photos of my girlfriend, too… and blurry images of the third arrondissement.
April 2008, a personal project I initiated while a student at the EMI-CFD, a photojournalism school in Paris… there was this photographer from Tendance Floue of whom class was all about “putting your guts on the table” as he’d say… so I focused on documenting my grandmother’s grieving.
It went out as a “P.O.M.” (still images and sound mixed together to form a short narrative piece) and you can see it here: http://vimeo.com/6863439
So New York is like, the best place on Earth for pizzas, right? And, still, someone managed to spoil a beautiful slice… what a shameful waste. Oct. 2010.
Half and a year ago, I think (actually, I know: this was NYE), water guns, Jean-Marie is one tough motherfucka when it comes to water guns.
“J’ai eu mon bac”, lit. “I graduated!”, summer 2005 in Paris… I remember considering I actually could sell this photo as an illustration in a stock photo agency… I don’t remember succeeding at that. I didn’t know what being a photographer would mean to me at the time…
