TITLE: «FLOATING» (Wet Portraits)

The wet portrait is a questioning of one’s own image (that which one has of oneself, that which one gives to see), to «get wet» in the literal and figurative sense, (to take intimate risks in french).
A situation where each subject, brought back to its simplest expression (destitution more than bare) no longer plays the dress and hair codes that guide the viewer.

Everyone takes the risk not to please or not to please because the purpose here is not to flatter the shooting but to abandon to the photographer a moment of humanity, in a suspended time that he can capture or not.

The wet body brings back to birth and water symbolizes, at all times, purification; wet, the adult subject finds a form of innocence at the same time as he carries on his face a life course, it is this in-between that the author proposes to seize.
An in-between where the person, in a brief moment of floating, «escapes» or lets go.




Extracts from 20 portraits in black and white silver medium format.

AUTHOR: Bernard Drouillet (France)

Born in Paris in 1954, Bernard Drouillet divides his life between music and photography from the 1980s, after an education marked by the Latin Quarter, the Lycée Henri Quatre and the Sorbonne.
Alongside a career as a jazz drummer who led him to play and record with various French and American musicians, he became passionate about photography in the late 1970s and in 1992 studied at the Centre de Formation et de Documentation (CFD) in Paris to become a photojournalist.

An independent photo-reporter from 1992 to 1998, he distributed his work in colour through the agencies Sipa and Editing until 2006, with various magazine press releases such as Nouvel Observateur, Actuel, l'Express, V S D, La Vie and others.
It was during a collective exhibition at the UPC (Union of Creative Photographers) (Paris France) in 1997, that he will show for the first time his personal work in black and white.