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PORTRAIT
Martial Lenoir is a photographer born in 1971, who lives and works in Paris. He has just recently left his workshop in Pantin, located in a vast industrial wasteland, a place bearing the image of the character. He discovers photography at the age of thirty, "by chance", and then acquires his first camera, a Mamiya RB67, which will never leave him. His first three series, La loge des rats (for which he won an award at the European Festival of Nude Photography in Arles, in 2009), Les Garçonnes and Reflets du disorder, are in-depth and studied minimalist stagings where the aesthetic of the boudoir is exacerbated. The model is nude, sporting corsets, boas, beads and garters, displaying a delicate and active pose. With Martial, the model never smiles, the beauty is cold, diaphanous, icy, as if to link solitude to introspection, like its light: constantly natural.
Like a precious painting, the moment seems captured, but without any dramatic tension. From now on, Martial carries out numerous tests for agencies and develops in fashion. But here, no excessive ornamentation or opulent, saturated staging. Make way for the raw: the woman is sublimated naturally, without artifice. She is magnified by her simple beauty and in her simple apparatus. As her creations progress, the accessories evaporate to give free rein to primitive nudity. His latest series, "concrete", is the privileged witness, both by the cognitive impact of the title and by the raw result. Martial is a prolific and passionate photographer, a lover of the polaroid, its treatment, its many techniques and variations. He released the instantaneous box for several consecutive years, to lead, thus, to this result of the most neat.
EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW
Your main character trait?
Hard worker, super hard worker. When I like something, I can work like crazy. On the dressing room, I worked for 3 years at the rate of 3 to 4 sessions per week. When I was at photo school, during the day I was doing prints, and at night I had set up a lab and I continued to do prints until 4 or 5 in the morning. So hardworking … when it pleases me.
Which one are you the least proud of?
Pride! Very misplaced pride.
The one you hate in others?
The lack of humility (Laughs). And the lack of humor, I can't stand people who are too serious, who lack humor.
Why nude?
When I started doing photography, I said to myself that I would never do nudes. I had seen everything nude, there were nude masters and apart from them all I saw was boring, repetitive, and mostly just naked girls for to be naked. Then came my series of the lodge of the rats. I found a place, then ideas to stage characters. When I start a series I never know how it will end. In the book “the lodge” there were very dressed photos and others very naked which I did not keep because they were less moving. The very first photo in the series was of a stripper. So she wanted to pose naked. I did it in the dressing room, hence “La loge des rats” and it was when I saw this first photo that I continued to do it in this place. I started to discover the light on the body, and the light on the nude, it's extraordinary. And the reaction of the girls when they undress, there is a completely different emotion! This emotion intrigued me. My work now is nude oriented, and I claim it. That's what I'm known for.
- Find the continuation of Martial Lenoir dansNormal Magazine n°5, n°6 and n°10 -
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