RENCONTRES
2025, Photo series, 40x40cm, B&W, Prints on PE paper
In the photo series Encounters, I show portraits of people I met during my stay in Marseille. I perceived the meetings we arranged for the photo shoots as a way of getting o know each other. Sometimes the choice of location was random, sometimes we decided together where the photo should be taken. It should be a place where the person also usually spends time. I like to think that their preferred environment tells us something about their character and history in a visual way. The series was shot with a Mamiya medium format camera. To take a photo, you look through the light shaft viewfinder.
Due to a folding mechanism, where the image is viewed vertically from above on a ground glass screen, it appears reversed and mirrored. I often find it uncomfortable to look someone directly in the eye when photographing them and to point the camera at them like a drawn weapon. The inverted image, this indirect ‘distance’, helps me to create a more intimate and relaxed atmosphere between myself and the person being photographed. According to Nan Goldin „the relationship and the immediate interaction are what creates the photograph – not onesided observation.“ It is a dialogue that always involves both sides. The I and the YOU are equally important. Taking photographs and being photographed is an encounter in itself.
PHOTOGRAPHY Flurina Schneider
MODELS Meg, Olivier