Arno Brignon
France
Josephine
Josephine
“Lying by omission, family photographs are only meant to convey good times that are turned into good souvenirs ,” according to Pierre Bourdieu.
What’s interesting about Arno’s work, a new father but already a confirmed photographer, is his interrogation on the possibility of making art out of these moments, so strong but so basically common, and his existence as a father, a photographer, a daddy-photographer...
It’s not on an affirmative proud tone that Arno confides us with these images of his fatherhood but more on an inquisitive level that questions his place in this strange love story of two that all of a sudden becomes a triangle : his wife who becomes a mother who carries, plays, bathes, dances, feeds and sleeps with the child (turning her back to him, her man), a little girl (their daughter), Joséphine, watching without really seeing, is there and him, like an outsider, behind the mask of his camera having a hard time finding his proper place and focusing on the object of his desire.
The fact that his photos are not exactly framed, navigates from foreground to background, Joséphine’s gaze that slips, the presence of objects that surround the subject, from the centre towards the outskirts, from outside to inside shows the anxiety of the father that the photographer translates as a sort of visual wandering.
Arno Brignon’s world is not calm. It possesses a strange anxiety, dear to André Breton, but as beautiful as a fortuitous encounter between two individuals who are searching to catch each others gaze across a changing table, feeling one’s way and that only time will finish by revealing.
Arno Brignon
Arno Brignon was born in 1976 in Paris. He lives in Toulouse. In 2010, he graduated from ETPA (Gd Jury Prize), he left his job as an educator in the unprivileged districts to devote himself entirely to photography.
He distributes his work between reporting assignments, personal research and teaching in the Ateliers de Photographie Saint-Cyprien (St Cyprien Photography Workshops). He joined the agency Signatures, house of photographers, in 2013.
