Girona

'The Afriques 2004-2014 exhibition recounts ten years of travels to Africa. To put together this set of works, I first selected images close to my heart, which conjured up intense visits to Uganda, Chad, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mauritania and Burkina Faso between 2004 and 2011. Between 2012 and 2014, I went to Mali, Niger, and again to Mauritania and Burkina Faso, and produced four photographs, three of which are on display here. Each work is the fruit of encounters, with women driven by callings or convictions, exiles, war refugees, or women displaced by internal conflicts.

These photographs, which I call “photo-tableaux,” have generally been created by the juxtaposition of hundreds of shots, sometimes taken over several days. The final work is a narrative, and at the same time, a subjective gaze on models whose daily life I shared: women whose portraits I initially produced in the form of paintings and “classic” photographs, and whose testimonies I gathered. My “photo-tableaux” offer the photographic work of a painter, inspired as much by the subject and environment as by the pictorial compositions of the Old Masters.'

Titouan Lamazou