Home Residents Alain Willaume

Alain Willaume

Photography
Jan. 
 Apr. 2024

Presentation

Alain Willaume has been a member of the Tendance Floue collective since 2010. Coordonnées 72/18, a monograph, was published by Éditions Xavier Barral in 2019 and shortlisted for the Prix Nadar that same year. In 2022 Arnaud Bizalion éditeur published Un Réalisme Hanté, a book of interviews of Alain Willaume by Fabien Ribéry.

A photographer for whom fiction is not the underside of reality but one of its modalities, Alain Willaume does not oppose engagement and mystery but instead unites them in a form which has no need to shout to make itself heard. His taciturn images trigger thoughts and words. A dedicated experimenter of forms who situates his practice outside the mainstream, Alain Willaume develops a body of enigmatic images, each of which conveys the tension and vulnerability of individuals and the world.


Project

Fêlures, failles et fragments (Tremblings on Mount 9)

Alain Willaume’s work is grounded in wabi sabi, a Japanese aesthetic concept which celebrates impermanence and imperfection; the flow of time as a source of plenitude and a sense of peaceful melancholy. An ancient yet irrefutably modern concept, wabi sabi is profoundly rooted in Japanese culture. It can also offer a means of deciphering Willaume’s vision as a photographer.

Contemporary industrial and environmental disasters have revived notions such as vulnerability, frugality and slow consumption that were once scorned. In the light of this new world state, wabi sabi confronts us with a paradox: that of the beauty of imperfection. Alain Willaume – whose work is deliberately inhabited by semantic ambiguities, shifts in form and meaning, and formal imperfections – wishes to study the profundity of wabi sabi in the country that conceived of it. This awareness of distance and Willaume’s love of shadow can perhaps sum up his artistic approach and also explain why he is drawn to this “imprecise zone” that encourages questions and extends rather than impedes knowledge.

Crédits

Portrait: ©Meyer _ Tendance Floue
1- Alain B dans le bus. Strasbourg. 1973. © Alain Willaume / Tendance Floue
2- L’hésitant. St Petersbourg. Russie. 2004. © Alain Willaume / Tendance Floue
3- Série « Échos de la poussière et de la fracturation ». Région du Karoo. Afrique du sud. 2012. © Alain Willaume / Tendance Floue
4- La main de Z. Série « Insomnies ». Venouse. 2018. © Alain Willaume / Tendance Floue