“Telling stories in photography has always been my obsession.”
Telling stories in photography has always been my obsession”, explains Jean-Claude Delalande, a master in the art of staging and self-portraiture. Skilfully crafted like a painting, each of his images is like an episode in a saga telling the story of “a life”. Where other photographers would invent extraordinary adventures, he revels in the banality of everyday life: ‘Jean-Claude with his wife by the sea’, ‘Jean-Claude at the maternity hospital’, ‘Jean-Claude in a supermarket car park’… With this collection entitled ‘Quotidien’, he seems to be vowing fidelity to his own existence. In parallel with his photographic practice, which he has been patiently building up year after year for almost thirty years, he worked for an insurance company. Not a smile escapes his lips. He is there, at once actor, witness and intruder in the scenes he invents. As in the game of seven errors, ‘anomalies’ seem to creep into the images from time to time, in the register of humour and irony. This ‘Quotidien’ series is one of many he has produced, including ‘Journal intime’, about a man who has no friend but himself, and ‘Tentatives’, about a man who fails all his suicide attempts. In most of his images, Jean-Claude Delalande stares straight into the lens, as if to challenge us. For he is also talking about us, re-enacting in his own sophisticated way the rituals of amateur photography. It’s only a short step from the particular to the universal… In this way, he focuses on the medium’s ability to tell the story of the passage of time and to preserve traces and memories.
by Sophie Bernard
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