A new life in the watcher reality by Stéphane Pellennec

Stéphane Pellennec is a French self-taught photographer living in Finland with his family since 1996. Since his childhood, he has used music and drawing for expressing himself. He started to be interested in making pictures in his twenties when he got his first reflex camera.

About fifteen years later, he has understood that the tools that photography gives him allow him to go beyond the appearances of things into something more introspective. However, the digital era has given him the best tools for it. He could see directly the results of the pictures he took, straight after he takes them, he could edit them by himself from his home computer and so he could experience new techniques without too many expenses but with total control on the image.

“Before this, I’ve always been frustrated by the results commercial labs gave me. Though I still use analog cameras (it depends on the photography I’m making) my digital reflex camera became a brush for me. I experience different ways to take the pictures, long timing while moving the camera, shooting from moving boats, etc shooting of moving elements with slow shutter speed or using the lens for loosing any focus point and create images of distorted silhouettes, creating at the end images that look more as paintings than photographs, but still being 100% photographs as the result  comes from the action of the light on a sensitive surface during a lap of time. Photography is about the instant, the present and is not really the progressive work that painting is. So, by my photography I tend to record the instant, but not as something especially figurative but more as something introspective. How the instant affects me? What could be the essence of what I see? For my mind not to be driven by the physical aspects of the subject and try to be free from it, for me to feel more than to see, I distort the figurative aspects of the subject and try to be free from it. This way I bring up some works which are completely opened to the watcher personal interpretation. I like to think my image finds a new life in the watcher reality. “

He think the words of Antoine de Saint Exupery helped him in his way to create his images: “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye“.

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