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Alexandre Deschaumes
A self-taught musician and photographer since early 2000, Alexandre is inspired by ethereal atmospheres.
"It's not just the visible reality that inspires me. It is by giving it an interpretation, particularly personal and emotional, that we will begin to be able to magnify this scene. And this includes the invocation of unspeakable energies ... Among all things, it is the atmosphere that guides me ... Always."
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This painting by Albert Bierstadt, created in the 1860s, exists somewhere between a real inspiration drawn from the Rocky Mountains, which he genuinely explored, and a reconstructed, almost dreamlike vision. It does not depict a specific, identifiable location, but rather a romantic interpretation built upon a real foundation.
This is precisely what interests me in his work, and what I try, in my own way, to approach through photography. The challenge is that photography is far more constrained by reality. We can attempt to move away from it, but the results often become artificial, caricatural, sometimes overly smooth or demonstrative. Here, on the contrary, everything is constructed, yet nothing feels artificial.
This is largely due to the material itself: the texture, the transitions, the subtle tonal variations. Nothing is overly sharp, nothing is aggressively emphasized. It is far from the polished, hyper-defined look we often associate with contemporary imagery. And most importantly, it avoids a common issue in landscape photography: the distortion of wide-angle lenses, which tends to weaken the presence of distant forms.
Here, the scene is wide, yet the way the mountain emerges in the background evokes something closer to a longer focal length. The planes are perfectly articulated, and the proportions feel, to me, ideal. The mountain retains its full weight and presence without being diminished by the foreground. Achieving this kind of balance in photography is extremely difficult.