Artist Statement

During my early formation I became convinced that the most intimate truths are often found not in news or documentary precision, but in the interpretative language of art.

The humanistic photography of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Elliott Erwitt and Richard Kalvar deeply influenced my early vision, while the chromatic intensity of photographers such as Ernst Haas, Gueorgui Pinkhassov and Alex Webb later expanded my sensitivity to light and colour.

In my work until 2020 the focus was the theatricality of everyday life. People appeared as actors within ordinary situations, where empathy and humour were essential elements of my approach. Photography allowed me to suggest an “other reality”, a poetic dimension within the present moment.

In the series Terroirs, created in the rural landscapes of South Africa, human presence merges with nature rather than opposing it, and the natural environment becomes the stage of human gestures and rituals.

Looking back at these works today, I recognise that the central element of my vision was the energy circulating between people — their relationships, gestures and rituals.

The global isolation brought by the Covid years gradually redirected my attention toward elemental forces and the transformation of matter. Since 2022 this exploration has taken form in the body of work I present as the Primordial Trilogy. Here Planet Earth is seen as one of us, simply the  biggest. Human beings are still the center of my vision.

In “The Secrets of Maturity,” Hans Caronne writes: “Man is the only creature on Earth who has the will to look inside another.” This will, writes Gaston Bachelard, can make vision a kind of violence, discovering the crack, the fissure, the crevice through which the secret of hidden things can be violated.

In my “inter-human”                             photographic work, I have always limited the inspection, leaving it to the imagination, different for each of us, to “daydream” about the story before or after the image I have created in the photo.

In my current work on the great creature in our image and likeness, Planet Earth, I want to go deeper, because it is in those hidden darknesses that we can find our intimacy. I do this because I do not want to indulge passive curiosity, which seeks surprising effects, those of the “wow” effect.