straightforward portraiture by Benoit Paillé

Benoit Paillé is a Canadian photographer, based in Montreal, striving to be more an artiste than a photographer ; thus as he says he has just one lens. This is the Artist’s statement from the Flickr photostream : “I am above all else constantly experimenting with my immediate environment, both social and natural. To put it more accurately, my work focuses on questioning the limits imposed by humanity. How can one push away these self imposed limits and constraints. Or, as in my most recent series, how to redefine the landscape with the help of a manmade light presence. While playing with the boundaries between conventions, I try to find a personal definition of established photographic genres. At the heart of this research, light is predominant in the process of sublimation of the commonplace, of the forgotten and neglected subject. I work and explore light as I would a sculptural media, as a matrix of what we can see and interpret. I feel that showing banality could make it extraordinary, and thus I take great care to create repetitions, through a rigorous and obsessive series-oriented approach, motivated by a quest for pure aesthetics. I am also interested in the narrative the image induces, in the story it invariably creates. My approach could be said to be documentary-based, but only at first glance, for in truth I try to transform reality. I wish to present of people, things and places a vision that is free of any (self) learnt stereotypes. I lean therefore more towards the constructed image. Constructing images allows me to reach my goal quicker, which is to uncover a neglected reality, judged too commonplace to be of any interest. To show the real, I use tricks and fakery: it is my belief that photography is not a representation of the real, but creates it.” Check out his “Stranger” project here. Check out his Flickr portfolio here.