Matter
Thirty years ago, I entered the world of photography through the door of the film. Very quickly, black and white became the obvious choice, with its powerful simplicity and raw truth. Even more than that, I was seduced by the grain, that subtle vibration that envelops the image and gives it an almost tactile depth. In the darkroom, I developed my films, printed my images on baryta paper, and discovered this intimate dialogue between light and matter.
This project is a dialogue – raw material, worked material, and the photographer’s gaze; exploring the transformation that man imprints on matter. My gaze focused on the texture of materials, raw or transformed, wood, metal, stone – all carry a story, a memory, a life.
It is also a conversation between yesterday and today: the memory of the darkroom and the digital tools that extend this requirement. The ACROS Film Simulation is the heir to film photography and extends the poetry of black and white, inscribing the material in the image as a palpable presence. It is also a conversation between materials. I conceived these images as diptychs to create a dialogue between wood, stone and metal. The reflections of the metal respond to the patterns of the marble, while the carved wood responds to the cut stone.
Workshops of Matter
At a woodturner’s workshop, I watched wood come back to life. Noble woods – yew, lilac, oak – salvaged from tree surgeons and destined to disappear, were transformed by the tools. The wood turned, and little by little pure curves, delicate lines and volumes that seemed to breathe appeared. Photographing these pieces was a way of translating this silent poetry: a fallen tree became a work of art, abandoned material found a second life.
Then I entered the workshop of a friend who works with metal. Here, the universe was different: cold and hot at the same time, luminous, almost electric. The reflections, structures, and sparks revealed a material in perpetual flux. What were once mere tools or utilitarian objects became, in my eyes, pure abstraction. The details transformed reality into surreal visions, the shimmering surfaces opened up like unknown landscapes. Photographing metal meant capturing a dance of light, a poetry born of fire and iron.
Finally, in front of the stone, I found myself facing a rich mineral universe. Each block seemed to contain a thousand-year-old story. The veins, strata and fractures spoke of time, of geological memory. I photographed these surfaces as fragments of eternity, creating abstract images where stone became pictorial matter, a silent tableau of the intimate and the infinite.
Film Simulations as photographic writing
To recreate these worlds, I needed a technique that could dialogue with my analogue memory while opening up new horizons. The FUJIFILM X-E5 was the obvious choice. Its design takes me back to my early days. But above all, its dials, custom settings and Film Simulations allow me to adapt my vision in a single gesture. I can switch between Fujifilm Film Simulations and my own simulations saved in the FS1 to FS3 settings without interrupting my creative flow.
For this project, the choice of film was clear – ACROS, in its ACROS Ye version. I found a delicate balance in it, an intensity that keeps the subject alive. Where ACROS R dramatizes to the extreme and hardens the skies, ACROS Ye offered me finer nuances, a subtle contrast that matches the texture of wood, metal or stone. It is a poetry of greys, a black and white where each material retains its unique voice.
As I used to do in my darkroom, I played with the settings to find the density and tension that I love. The COLOR CHROME EFFECT and COLOR CHROME FX BLUE broaden the range of tones, enrich the materials and enhance their depth.
I adjusted the TONE CURVE: lowered HIGHLIGHTS (H +1), accentuated SHADOWS (S +3). This gives the image greater contrast without sacrificing detail. And, to reconnect with my love of film photography, I added a slight grain (GRAIN EFFECT: WEAK, LARGE), so that each image breathes and comes alive.
From raw material to the poetry of black and white
This project is a conversation between man and matter, between craftsman and photographer, between the film photography of yesterday and the digital photography of today. Turned wood, forged metal and carved stone find an echo in the photographic grain. Matter responds to the matter.
In photographing these materials, I did not seek to document, but to transfigure. To reveal, in a flash of light, in a curve or a grain, the poetry that lies dormant in the world. To show that photography, even digital photography, can still be a work of matter: grain, contrast, texture, density. Like a bridge between two eras, between two ways of working with images, but always with the same quest: to make matter visible, palpable, poetic.
From raw materials emerge abstract images, silent tableaux; the grain of a stone becomes an inner landscape, a curve in wood becomes a line of poetry, a shard of metal becomes a star. The craftsman transforms the material, the photographer reveals it.
Photography pays tribute to wood, metal, stone – and to the black and white grain that makes them sing.
Ultimately, it is always the same quest – to make the invisible visible. The gesture responds to the gaze. And from this encounter emerges a photograph that is both raw and poetic, a photograph in which the material becomes language.
FILM SIMULATION: ACROS Ye
MONOCHROMATIC COLOR: WC-2 MG -2
GRAIN EFFECT: WEAK, LARGE
COLOR CHROME EFFECT: STRONG
COLOR CHROME FX BLUE: STRONG
SMOOTH SKIN EFFECT: OFF
WHITE BALANCE: AUTO/ R 5, B 0
DYNAMIC RANGE: DR400
D RANGE PRIORITY: OFF
TONE CURVE: H +1, S +3
COLOR: 0
SHARPNESS: 0
HIGH ISO NR: -3
CLARITY: +3
