“I was in the circus … until the accident”. That is a reasonable version of how Sylvain Granjon replied to my “tell me about yourself” question last summer in Arles. My heart soared with the prospect of pictures made by someone who has been communicating
Long before digital darkroom, photographers had their own ways of creating magic, surrealism, and new realities with montaged photographs, sometimes in the wet darkroom, and sometimes simply with a pair of scissors and some glue. Paris photographer, Sylvain Granjon, carries that tradition on with two new series, Photography Genetically Modified and Je suis né arc en ciel. We featured Sylvain’s charming project with his daughter some years ago, Douce Amère and this new work continues in the vein of play and transformation.
I was born a rainbow is the new series by Sylvain Granjon. It is selected in the favorites of the Rencontres d’Arles and will be screened during the night of the year, on July 7, 2017 in front of the Papeteries Etienne. While taking varied forms, Sylvain Granjon’s work is indeed crossed by lines of force and obsessions: creative immersion in an imaginary universe, the complexity of our relationship to time, memory and childhood, self-representation and self-portraits. The photographer writes: « In April 2014, I bought a trunk containing the belongings of a fair monster on the Biron flea market in Paris. The Rainbow Man. He had kept all the records of his life. What struck me at once was the graphic quality of these archives. The monster was dubbed by an artist, certainly self-taught, in a style reminiscent of the surrealists of 1920’s: photomontages, collages, use of extracts of articles or the hand colored of each pictures representing him and his family. I could not keep such a discovery for myself, so I made a precise inventory of the many documents and photos in order to try to convey the life of this man as accurately as possible »
