Arnaud Montagard, a French photographer who has been living in the United States for over ten years, is a true product of street photography. With numerous awards to his name, including one from the Florida Museum of Photographic Arts in 2020, he approaches the country's geographical landscape as a vast playground and field of investigation, collecting and working with American photographs through the lens of an expatriate.
In the contemporary imagination, the United States and the Hollywood universe seem synonymous. In Arnaud Montagard's images, it is another facet of the country that we (re)discover, tinged with the melancholic and adventurous imagination of a Jack Kerouac in The Road Not Taken, or with the culture of the western and its poetic cowboys in There Is a Silence.
In his series Slice of Light, the city, as if on a sheet of paper, takes shape and illuminates its passersby. The color contrasts are striking. The scenes draw us into the poetry of everyday life. In recent years, however, Arnaud Montagard has adopted an increasingly documentary approach, but without losing the precision of his framing or his fascination with cinematic atmospheres.
In addition to his appreciation for his subjects and the people he photographs, he conveys a stronger sense of individuality in those he highlights. The slow pace of his work evokes a feeling of gentleness in the relationships he cultivates with the places and their inhabitants.
The slowness of the exchange and the gentleness of the listening thus shift us into a timeless universe, where reality meets cinematic myth.
