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About Me
Thank you for visiting my web site. I was born in Fribourg (Switzerland) in 1964 and moved to Boston, Massachusetts in 1993, where I now live and work. I am a self-taught photographer, with special interests in figure, night and architecture photography. My work has been shown in numerous solo and group shows and have been featured in recent magazines including View Camera, Preservation Magazine, and Art-Photo-Akt (see Resume for more details).
During the last 20 years, I have focused my cameras both on the nude and night scenes. In fact, my first black and white contact sheet has images with both themes. Although nude and night photographs may appear to be quite different, I think that they have a lot in common. For one thing, my photography is usually more about capturing time than space. The long exposures I use at night and the slow scanning technique I use for my “nudes in movement” emphasize the fact that space cannot be dissociated from time. My images challenge the notion that different events captured on a single frame have occurred simultaneously. In my photographs, the passage of time is captured by showing on the same image different instances of image elements continuously moving during the exposure. The events occurring at the top and the bottom of the image are not simultaneous, and although these elements are the same all across the image, the passage of time has warped them into new objects, or eliminated them altogether. Photographic snapshots can preserve memories of the past. I believe that photography can do more: capture the very passage of time.
My photography is also about capturing the essence of what is in front of my camera, it is about simplifying. Clothing gives too many confusing clues about the subject of a photograph, it is distracting. Removing a person’s clothing takes away all hints of historic period, social status, time of day, etc. The same thing happens for instance in a city scene. The long exposures used for night photographs strip the images from the fleeting details; the large shadow areas focus the viewer’s attention on the essential elements of the scene, capturing the essence of the place.
For my non-editorial work, I do not care much for the ability of photography to document or describe anything. I am much more fascinated by its ability to transform things. I use long exposures, dramatic lighting, selective framing, or the optical properties of water to transform the objects in front of me and to create new shapes. My purpose is not to “take a picture” of something, but to create a new object that only exists for a certain period of time, and can only be seen from a very narrow angle.
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