Jean-Paul Soujol (France) lives in Provence at the foot of Mont Ventoux. His approach to photography is a quest for creativity. In a dialogue with light, the subject becomes a sculpture, and the landscape gives birth to landscapes. He leads us to a process in which the photographer becomes a painter. The horizon is her guideline. He chooses his compositions so that the elements respond or reverse to end in abstraction. The earth becomes the sky, the sky becomes the sea. "Photography enables me to challenge myself, to express the unchangeable fascination of human being in the sacred link between earth and heaven". His minimalist vision drives him to think and compose square. Every photograph is a creation, rotation, motion, long exposure, filters… are all ways of detaching one's subject from its all too familiar and ordinary envelope, of removing its mask to place it in a new landscape. For this, Jean-Paul Soujol does not take a photograph momentary, on the fly, he operates in the order of the minute or the hour. Only the scum, the condensed… the essence, remains. As her practice asserts itself to landscapes that are more and more bare, where nature triumphs naked, in the blue of the sea or a sea of lavender, in the pink of a twilight sky, in the white of the snow, in the withdrawal of all colors and shapes. All of these views are so many visions. They are the fruits of what technology can offer more perfected and they abolish it by turning it against itself, in a way, to let emerge a world of original purity. |