Alain Guiraudie Biography

His photographs record ordinary events that feature nothing other than themselves. They capture time and frame a space. When set alongside Alain Guiraudie's films and novels, these photos could be taken for location snapshots. That's what they look like. And sometimes that's what they are. However, Alain Guiraudie doesn't see them as a step in his work. Here, for the photographer, lies the desire to capture on a (photographic) film configurations (people, places...) without this becoming a (cinematic) film. What does Alain Guiraudie seek out, day and night, in these peri-urban zones, these French and European towns? Varieties of genre scenes that have produced themselves. Using a 50 mm lens, which is reputed for being worthy, distant and not overdoing it, they find a balance and are articulated around a palette, a kind of pictorial elegance, related to painting. Photographic fixity (as opposed to cinematographic dynamics) sets a situation and all its particulars into a frozen totality; these photographs do not invite me into an interpretative examination, they record facts, each one being of an equal, legible importance.

His recent solo exhibitions include Crèvecœur, Paris (FR), Buchhloz, Berlin (DE), Le Fresnoy, Lille (FR). Invited by Le Nouveau Printemps, he is the associate artist in charge of the artistic program of the festival this year in Toulouse (FR). His selected group exhibitions include Le Consortium, Dijon (FR) and Crèvecœur Paris (FR). His work is in public collection such as Frac Normandie (FR).

Text courtesy Crèvecoeur.