1.WHEN, WHERE AND WHY DID YOU TAKE THE PICTURE?

I took this pic­ture in small French city Blois two years ago. The scene was like thread of eter­nity and I could not resist myself to record it.

2.WHAT DO WE SEE IN THE PICTURE AND WHAT’S THE STORY BEHIND IT?

This is an every­day scene, with men cou­ple sit­ting on the bench, dri­ving cars pass­ing by and the screen, framed by trees. The story behind is com­plex. In short, it is about, love, time, sense, tran­si­tori­ness, fic­tions, long­ing, friend­ship — life.

3.WHY IS THIS PHOTO IMPORTANT FOR YOU?

This photo is impor­tant for me because it embod­ies one of my major approaches in pho­tog­ra­phy, which is to (ab)use every day scenes for express­ing wider mean­ings and senses.

4.WAS THIS AND IMPROVISED SHOT OR DID YOU PLAN EVERYTHING BEFOREHAND?

Street shot usu­ally can’t be planed, because nor­mally you can’t con­trol the pro­tag­o­nists and sur­round­ings at all. On the other hand, the story of the photo was in my mind before I took the shot. With­out ideas images don’t exist.

DID YOU HAVE TO OVERCOME SOME DIFFICULTIES TO GET THIS SHOT RIGHT OR WAS IT A PIECE OF CAKE?

It was dif­fi­cult shot, because I wanted the cars to be in motion blur and the pro­tag­o­nist to be sharp. So I had to make a deci­sion about shut­ter speed. It was even more dif­fi­cult because I didn’t have the tri­pod with me, so I needed to put the cam­era on my knees. I just prayed that the main pro­tag­o­nist will stay still at the right moment.

6.WHAT CAMERA AND LENS DID YOU USE FOR THE IMAGE (OR IMAGES) AND HOW DID YOU ADJUST THE CAMERA (ISO, APERTURE, SPEED, FOCAL LENGTH…)?

I used canon 5DII, 24 – 105 lens, iso 50 because it was around 17pm so still the harsh light, aper­ture of 20 and 0.8 of a second.

7.DID YOU APPLY ANY KIND OF DIGITAL EDITING TO THE IMAGE (OR IMAGES)? HOW’S YOUR WORKFLOW?

I did apply some edit­ing. First of all con­ver­sion to B&W, some cloning was needed to accent the story too. I roughly changed the left side of the frame. And yes, I have at least 10 ver­sions of this image. At last you always need to decide which one deserves to be public.

8. HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE YOURSELF AS A PHOTOGRAPHER?

For 13 years my main occu­pa­tion was phi­los­o­phy. As a pho­tog­ra­pher I try to con­tinue my philo­soph­i­cal won­der­ings and dive as deep as pos­si­ble into the pro­duc­tion of mean­ing and sense. The only thing I do is research­ing the rela­tion between the light, con­den­sa­tion of light in the frame and onto­ge­n­e­sis of the mean­ing and sense throw the con­junc­tion of the light and language.

9.WHAT ARE YOU TRYING TO TELL THE WORLD WITH YOUR IMAGES?

I believe that pho­tos exist in the cross­ing between pho­tog­ra­pher and viewer. So pho­tog­ra­phy is not fin­ished, but rather liv­ing entity. Each viewer with his own imag­i­na­tion inter­prets what he sees and coop­er­ates equally in the pro­duc­tion of a photo. So, speak­ing about sin­gle photo is mere fic­tion. Sin­gle photo does not exist. I am not telling any­thing with my pho­tos. All I would like to achieve with them is to encour­age the view­ers to think.

10.IS THERE ANYTHING ELSE YOU WANT TO TELL US ABOUT YOUR IMAGE OR YOUR WAY OF WORKING?

My only hope is that my images say more, than me.

11.WHAT EQUIPMENT DO YOU USE?

I mostly use Canon 5DII and 24–105 lens. I also love to exper­i­ment with Nikon F75 and dif­fer­ent types of films. Of course lens­baby is always with me too.

12.IF THERE WERE FEW THINGS YOU COULD RECOMMENT TO ANOTHER PHOTOGRAPHER TO KEEP IN MIND DURING THEIR OWN DEVELOPMENT, WHAT WOULD YOU SAY?

I would not dare to say any­thing, because pho­tog­ra­phy in my opin­ion resists in the gap between sub­jec­tiv­ity and objec­tiv­ity. It is just a way of expres­sion which is always bounded with the lim­its of the motives of the self. Nev­er­the­less, my mes­sage is, to be a pho­tog­ra­pher one need to stop mak­ing pictures.

Intervied by Calvin Dexter