franck landron's biography
Biography written for the " Journal extime " exhibition
Play on the term « Journal Intime » which is a diary, « intime » being « intimate, private », so the idea is of something in-ternal turned into something ex-ternal.
Since the day he turned 13, on which he received his first camera, Franck Landron has been collecting traces of his reality. With all due modesty, on a daily basis, he patiently, in disciplined and meticulous fashion, puts together a record of essential moments.
Before being an artist, he is a craftsman gleaning confidently all the material needed to build up a work which will always be in progress. Everywhere he is, he serenely, discreetly, unbeknownst to the other even, fills himself, day after day, with the infinity of life’s colours.
What is he looking for? Nothing words can express. Simply a way to be in the world, instinctively picking up what should not be lost and which belongs to all of us. One first kiss, eyes staring into space, an exposed petticoat, desire, surrender, exchanging, wandering…
Through the lens, he says he picks up what is beyond words and unique. Freed from any time pressure, he lets the swarm of landscapes, faces, situations, emotions rest. It’s all there in the binders, neat and tidy. He spends hours quietly working on the negatives. Does not let anybody else do the processing. The negative is just a trace, the print is what matters since it is an interpretation. Having waited 40 years, he now exhumes the ten first years of his archives. This extreme maturing process is the key to his work. It defies the surrounding hectic pace, it defies the very stuff of photography which may fade to the point of disappearing, it more generally defies death.
Franck Landron makes the most of this jousting with time, this putting at a distance of the past Without it being a conscious decision from him, his images question the eternal questioning of the traces our stay on earth leave. Whether in a workman’s home or in a peasant’s, a vast barren land, a city, a village, or the subway, men, women, teenagers and children make a place for themselves, each in their own way.
They settle, expose themselves, shrivel, hide, bump into each other, help each other out, put up with each other, let each other down, or escape. Through his juicy sense of discrepancy and incongruity, all pathos is removed from this «Journal extime» to reveal unique and universal moments, little factories where the conscience of living is forever reinvented.
Franck Landron started taking pictures at 13. Born in 1957, he says he likes useless experiences: directing, acting, painting, taking pictures… He lives and works in Paris, managing his own film companyles films en hiver.