Cedric Delsaux is a French photographer who uses the Star Wars medium in our world today. The result is simply…… Just take a look for yourself yo, words can’t describe how Ill this is. I also included an interview he did last week with Linternaute, another online magazine from our neighbors across the way. Visit his website to view more of these amazing pieces.
Interviewer: How did you get into photography?
CD: Since I was 15 years old, I wanted to be a photographer. At first, I wanted to be a photojournalist, of taking long trips, and working for [the photo agency] Magnum. Then, I started moving away from these types of images, I didn’t believe in them anymore, without having anything to replace that belief with. I turned elsewhere, studied literature and film. I became a bookseller, then a conceptual editor in an ad agency. But slowly, I found my place [in photography], but it took ten years to begin
Interviewer: The “showcase of things” [la vitrine des choses] is something you began several years ago with “Northern France.” Why this second go-round, and why this time the theme of the suburb?
CD: More than anything else, I photograph places. And certain places provoke a feeling in me just odd enough that I can only evoke them in photography. With Northern France, it was my childhood vacations; with the “suburbs”, it’s simply the place where I live, where I shop, where I take the Metro. I want these places where my daily life takes place, where the most ordinary things occur, to be created in an extraordinary way.
Interviewer: How did you get this idea to integrate Star Wars’ images into your photography?
CD: At first I never thought about this ?implantation” [of Star Wars figures into my photography.] But my first images were flat and unoriginal. I needed something to get them going. And the Star Wars characters have this ability. With them, I rediscovered the impressions that flooded over me when I walked around the suburbs, this feeling that what is “real” is also a “fantasy.”
My images are not completely real, nor absolutely imaginary, neither true nor false ? they are about the in-between.
this undefined space I find so poetic.Finally, the suburbs are magnified by these characters. Without them, it is nothing; without it, they are nothing. If the series is working correctly, it has created a new territory that is purely in the realm of the photograph. But the series is not simply an aesthetic exercise and a visual oxymoron, to me it is something euphoric.
Interviewer: How did you integrate the Star Wars characters into your photographs? Is it digital.
CD: Yes, it is my first fully digital work. It’s a choice essentially dictated by its simplicity, although I could have also done these photos with conventional medium format film. Being opposed to digital photography no longer makes sense to me. I Photoshopped the Star Wars characters, but first I had to shoot them so they were the right height, taken from the right perspective and in the proper light, then place them into the backgrounds I had already shot.
Interviewer: How did your work as an advertising photographer lead you to these pictures?
CD: It’s been very valuable to work with the various art directors. There is real competition to make the best picture within the given constraints ? and sometimes enormous constraints ? of the ad campaign: from the cost-side and the client himself. So you have to find a new solution to each new problem. This permanent state of “gymnastics” is extremely helpful when you’re dealing with your own personal series. But beyond that, advertising photography (la pub) taught me a type of visual efficiency that I had not paid attention to, indeed, that I had looked down on somewhat. A really good advertising shot has an unreproachable photographic grammar. I tried in this [Star Wars] series to respect those rules.
Interviewer: Do you have any particular influences in the world of film and photography.
CD: Lots. In film, a director like David Lynch, for his sets, his lighting, his overall ambience, for everything, in fact, or Eric Rohmer, for his subtle touches of color, or Ken Loach, for his connection to the real. Among photographers, I think of Gregory Crewdson, Philip Locra di Corcia, William Eggleston or Stephen Shore, and so many others.
