Gilles Perrin

Informations about the artist

My role as a portrait photographer (practicing for over 25 years) is to bring together two actions : the meeting and the testimony. I make a portrait to confirm an identity to the person photographed at a given moment in a specific place.

The camera, through its testimonial capacity is the tool that allows me to translate my intimate vision of a subject, to fix the photographed / photographic relationship. It is to "emerge" the person photographed. I am a photographer of human heritage.

I practice photography in the spirit of August Sander and Edward Curtis. For 20 years I have accumulated a collection of portraits, a visual testimony of people destined to disappear or to transform themselves. I am interested in a reality that few people see, one that is outside the tourist paths and truisms of modernity.
All shots are the subject of a research, a dialogue. I seek the complicity of my subjects. I always have a preliminary contact during which I explain my intentions, my way of photographing so that each character has the desire to exchange, to exist in its human quality. The portrait is not anonymous, each photograph bears the name and quality of the person. I apply myself to making strong images that speak for themselves, the legend only serving to sign them in time and space.
To realize my images, once I negotiated the representation, I work with a large format room (4x5 inch).

My goal is to establish a ceremony to be in permanent relationship with my subject. This ritual is based on the use I make of the methodology of the large format. I choose the location of the shot, the near and far scene and its accessories, the angle of the light, I install the camera on a tripod in front of the subject to photograph, I ask him to take a hieratic pose and set the goal. I make a unique image. All the photos are made at low speeds, from second to 1/8 of a second, human speeds that allow me to catch a breath, a heartbeat.