The Substance Beneath the Visible
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Stephane Janin is a freelance photographer born in France in 1968.
He has lived many years in Cambodia, the country where "The Substance
Beneath the Visible" was initiated in 2006. Janin has since moved to
the United States, he now resides in Washington DC.
"The Substance Beneath the Visible was initiated at a time when I looked for
something different in my practise. I had made photos for more than 15 years
and most of the work had been focused on people, their faces, their activities,
their lives. I wanted to focus on something else, in a very different way,
something I had not experienced before. Playing with boxes (camera obscura),
I made tests with three eyes on one box. I found interest in it, I repeated again
and again, got more and more excited, and finally decided to make a work of it.
The juxtaposition of three supposedly identical pictures one to another creates
a panoramic landscape that doesn't exist in reality but that's still bound to that
reality. I still consider this project as a documentation project of an unchattered
territory, bringing to the surface clues and evidences - samples - of the places
visited. Having not really being into landscape photography in the past, I developed
a strong interest and curiosity in the way my camera obscura reinvent and restructure
reality in a landscape that could not be seen before."
"I definitely bring in some ideas about wandering or "hobo-ing" in the way I work.
The tools and materials I am using definitely talk about a sense of poverty and loss,
and how it can apply to a photographic process. The damages I impose to my paper
negatives (in the darkroom before pictures are shot) definitely talk about a sense
of failure, fractures and uncertainties..."
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