“I try to build images that do not impose to the viewer. By the work on acclimatization of the eye, by using the gum bichromate or by making installation dispositive. I am especially interested in the experience of watching.”
Mustapha Azeroual (born in 1979) is an abstract conceptual photographer from France. It’s not the image itself that’s in the center of his work. For Mustapha Azeroual photography is ” foremost a recording medium with all its possibilities, limitations and defects”.
Interview with Mustapha Azeroual
Mustapha, your work deals a lot with basic questions about the nature of photography: light and color. It’s very experimental in the way you treat and examine the photographic material itself. What exactly do you do?
It is for me to analyze the various components of the photographic to query the recording and restitution abilities of the medium and therefore the conditions of appearance of the image in the fields of the visible.
Finally, what does compose the image?
Why do you find it so intriguing to deal with photography from its material side?
The photography is first and foremost for me, a recording medium with all its possibilities, limitations and defects.
The study of the intrinsic capabilities of photography allows me to question our own perception, our relationship to the world.
Your works “Radiance #1 & 2” are excellent examples for your theoretical approach to examine color recording and subjectivity of color. To what conclusion did you get?
I built this work starting from the presupposition that: photographer cannot have total control on the colours he recorded, due to the constitution of photographic emulsions.
So I set up a protocol aimed at recording of colour that only exists on the surface of the photographic film, obtained by sum of colours.
It shows images providing a feeling of colour, images in which the viewer can enter and project his own experience.
The series that I produced, regardless of the medium used are for me, the steps of a comprehensive approach without other purpose that which can be granted to a photograph or a temporal punctuation, a point of view at a moment given.
Most of my series are numbered and induce a possibility of a next.
Objects that are emerge are all related to each other by the subjectivity that I apply.
What does a single photograph need in your opinion in order to stand out and get noticed? Especially keeping in mind the abundance of visual imagery in today’s society?
Today flows flood us with images whose reading is formatted and organized to be done quickly, the media used are glossy, bright, playing with a certain kind of fascination to communicated poor messages in many cases…
I try to build images that do not impose to the viewer, by the work on acclimatization of the eye, by using the gum bichromate or by making installation dispositive. I am especially interested in the experience of watching.
Many people have told me after watching one of my artwork that they were projected in a souvenir.
I am definitely more attracted by the invisible than the visible in photography…
Every photographer is going through different stages in his formation. Which “landmarks” do you recall that have marked you and brought you to the place where you are today as a photographer?
Because I am self-taught the only steps that helped me get where I am are the wonderful encounters that I’ve been given to do and the trust that I was given.
Last but not least, let’s switch roles: Which question would you have liked to be asked in this interview about your work that I didn’t ask? Please feel free to add it – as well as the answer.
I really found your questions relevant and interesting, you did noticed the important points of the approach, I see no further questions to add…
Thank you very much.
