Samuel Guerrier

Biography by Dr. Erin K. Donovan, Art Historian (USA).

 

Excerpt : 

Samuel Guerrier is a fine art photographer based in Paris. Trained as a painter at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, J.Y. Guionet artist studio, and L’Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Caen and as a computer graphics specialist, Guerrier approaches digital photography as a painter who uses light to bring his subject to life. [...] His work has been covered in press articles in China, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, the USA. 

His photographs combine detailed settings and powerful acting on the part of his models.[...]Taking up the dual role of director and photographer, Guerrier creates his portfolios like one would a film, with a story, a set, costumes, and with well directed actors. He constructs his photographs in a series format, which evokes film storyboards, unveiling his narrative image by image. 

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"Let’s just say that I used to be a painter dreaming of being a photographer, now I am a photographer dreaming of being a painter… We’re never pleased with what we have! (laughs)"

(Excerpt from Interview in FAULT MAGAZINE "Telling tales: An interview with photographer Samuel Guerrier" - London)

 

 

"The best compliment that I received came from an online viewer : he cited Kafka's Métamorphose after he saw the photo of Cosmo Gonik, in a retro-futurist look, transformed into a beetle..."

(Excerpt from Interview in A Shaded View On Fashion by Diane Pernet - USA)

 

 

I am a self-made photographer, made from my studies of painters and graphic artists. I remember J. Y. Guionet, my expressionist painting teacher, so talented and so opinionated. He asked us to focus on the shadows and lights rather than on the features themselves. He always said “Picasso is not a painter, he is an illustrator!”. At the end of the day, the medium is not so important. Whether you use new technologies, sanguine technique, or whatever technique you want, the real question is “do you have something to say?”

(Excerpt from Interview in FAULT MAGAZINE "Telling tales: An interview with photographer Samuel Guerrier" - London)

 

 

FAULT MAGAZINE : Your photographs always have a certain ‘darkness’ which makes them both dramatic and enigmatic. Do you agree with Degas in saying that there is a ‘mood of sadness’ that comes over anyone who takes up art? 

SG: Yes, of course, without wishing to fall into the aching artist cliché, you never produce anything good by being in last-stage depression(!). I do consider melancholy as a positive thing. It is a tremendous fuel to creativity. I can’t erase my past and childhood, but I can be born again in many different ways, all the rest is to recreate and re-imagine. Art is, for me, a kind of resilience.

(Excerpt from Interview in FAULT MAGAZINE "Telling tales: An interview with photographer Samuel Guerrier" - London)

 

"I am a result of miscegenation. My mother was a French Catholic, my father is a Tunisian Muslim, and I have a Jewish first name…. In this context I have a laic approach of things; I already wrote that I am not for any one religion or else – I’m for all of them."

(Excerpt from Interview in PUBLIC REPUBLIC "Artist of the Week" - Germany) 

 

 

"Samuel Guerrier captures these two arts like classical painting. He thus integrates his works with the “glacis” effect as practiced by the Florentines and the Flemish by  playing with négatifs. He is inspired by all kind of arts, it is believed by theater, film, literature. As his posers are mostly actors, he takes us through a story filled with spectacular and fantastical dreams"

(Excerpt from an Article by Orphane in ELITISM - Italia)

 

"As often in cinema, I start from an artificial base to obtain reality, I try to obtain the deepest and most sincere feeling from the actor"

(Excerpt from Interview in PUBLIC REPUBLIC "Artist of the Week" - Germany) 

 

 

"Samuel Guerrier is a fine art photographer whose distinctive style appears to be a hybrid between painting, photography and silent movie scenes. The actors that he uses to create his unique and surreal artistic style/mood appear to be caught in the action of a dramatic moment that transcends photographic poses to become a theatre of Samuel’s vision"

(Excerpt from an Article by Sue Clowes - Italia)

 

 

"I can fake an image, but I can't fake a feeling"

(Excerpt from Interview in A Shaded View On Fashion by Diane Pernet - USA)