Silhouettes captured from a low angle, drifting glacier debris, "portraits" of rocks or icebergs, solitary walkers in deserted expanses, rectilinear plays of shadow… Alexandre Souêtre has a sense of staging and minimalism. Of strangeness and melancholy too.

Thus, there is this strange portrait of a woman with a bare back wearing a woolen balaclava, or this other woman in underwear, photographed at the foot of a mountain, reflecting the sun's image onto her phone screen… Also strange, not to say ludicrous, is this group of men pacing the sidewalk in black suits, their faces covered with plastic bags…

Originally from Paris and based in the United States, the photographer, who is also a graphic designer and art director, admits to being drawn to "stillness, calm, non-event, intimacy […] which is always slightly off-kilter and strange».

Black and white or muted color palettes with a predominantly monochrome palette (except in his latest series shot in Iceland and Greenland), sections of minimalist architecture, fragments of nature (close-ups of rocks or ferrous or volcanic soils), naked bodies or bodies monumentalized by low-angle or backlit shots… Highly crafted and meticulous, even polished, his photographic style, though very graphic, gives pride of place to materials: earth, rocks, fabrics, hair… “Our environment, whether natural or urban, offers a wealth of exceptional textures and materials when observed and captured from a certain angle,” the photographer points out, explaining his quest for the rare image in these terms: I work with both film and digital photography. […] I tend to choose film for reasons that are often obvious: the results are timeless, the colors are irreplaceable, and the images produced are sublime, especially for portraits. But digital also offers […] a kind of perfection in image and texture often found in computer-generated imagery. This perfect, almost robotic rendering works very well with natural settings and textures such as rock, water, or earth. »

"PHOTOGRAPHING LIKE A GRAPHIC DESIGNER"

Drawn to landscape as much as to portraiture, to the " small, close, intimate "And the excessive, Alexandre Souêtre speaks thus of his dual practice of black and white and color: Although I'm primarily drawn to black and white, my first love in photography, I also enjoy playing with color, often almost more for graphic purposes: a colored subject can sometimes create a palette, and the tones become soft gradients that uniquely attract the eye. Black and white allows me to focus on composition and the interplay of shadows in a pure, almost graphic sense. I like to try to photograph like a graphic designer, and vice versa. »

SOUETRE.COM