This series represents coloured pictures, almost monochromatic as a melancholic tone, like a painting. An obsessive search for truth, sincerity and simplicity through bodies and faces, through beings. I try to get close to the other, to know him better hence to know myself better. I take interest in the human condition throught the different steps in life and body transformations: childhood, adolescence, old age, sickness, sexual identity… to put foreward the question of difference and normality.
When I took these portraits, the sessions were comparable to painting ones, lasting for several hours with each subject as they were modeled through light. In silence, just a few words to adjust the pose or a movement to get the right image, gesture or action. The setting up had to remain simple to allow the usual self-protection walls to collapse and then be able to get a deepness in the look, in the body. Giving up and letting go, that’s what could be considered as my descisive moment.
Vincent Gouriou
