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Alain-Gilles Bastide


1 : individual exhibition
0 : collective exhibition
1 : guest author

Not less than 19 years. The « picturer » (as he likes to call himself) Alain-Gilles Bastide needed that much time to find his way back to photography.

In 1968, as he was a customs officer, Alain-Gilles Bastide discovered photography. He soon realized it had opened a new horizon to him.

« I learned photography in a small photo-club. In 1970 I started to earn a living with my photographic work. Since the beginning, I got above all interested in the picture / text relationship. A new relationship sometimes called « photo-poetry », as the text develops a poetic relationship with the picture. »

This discovery gave birth to many creative experiences. Alain-Gilles Bastide had always a picture project to work on : « First steps » (1968-1973), « The Actor, Death and the Mirror » (1974), « People from my village » (1976), « Constat du désert par huissier assermenté » (1974-1976, a serial that gathered pictures of two years tra
velling all over the world), « La marée était en noir » (1976- first colour pictures of the Amoco-Cadiz shipwreck), « One ten Life Provocation » (1978), « Esteban's blue dream » (1979), « Sanguine-Bloodstone » (1980 - pictures of waxy models taken through Paris and New-York shops windows ; published in Zoom review), « Changing geometry Kimonoes » (1983).

« With the upcoming of the 110 format (photographic equivalent to cinema's 16 mm), I could create a new Picture, a « hyperrealistic » picture. »

The experience reaches its nadir with the cover of the oil rig explosion off Mexico. We have seen these « stolen » pictures at the front page of Paris Match and the international press : a « scoop », as journalists say. « Esteban's blue dream » will follow, relating in a poetical way Ixtoc-One impact on the local people.

Digital revolution and the end of silence.

The photographic adventure ends up with the « Changing geometry Kimonoes » exhibition at Marion Vallantine's Gallery, Paris. « I decided to stop working on creation pictures and to leave France for South America, where I lived for 20 years. There I was working on corporate image system. Digital revolution brought me back to research picture. »

Digital revolution also gave Alain-Gilles Bastide a new opportunity to hit the road again throughout the world. He is just coming back from Havana, « where you can see the city wearing away through people's left tracks », before leaving for Tchernobyl where « time stopped all of a sudden, violently stolen away at once...»

Jean-Louis Libois