The Picto Fashion Photography Award / Paolo Roversi Exhibition
The Picto Fashion Photography Award ceremony was held on 5 June last at the Palais Galliera in Paris, which was also hosting an exhibition dedicated to Paolo Roversi. The guests attending the award ceremony were also able to visit the exhibition of the renowned photographer’s work.
Christophe Batifoulier, Paolo Roversi’s printer, has made many platinum-palladium prints on ARCHES® Platine paper for the artist. Paolo Roversi and his printer, like many other photographers who have been inspired by the unique effects rendered by this technique, have developed a close working relationship founded on careful attention, precision and patience to make the most of the singular tones offered by platinum-palladium printing.
Four prizes were awarded, the Picto Fashion Photography Main Award, the le19M Métiers d’Art Photography Grant, the Filippo Roversi Grant and, new this year, the LGA Management / JANVIER endowment, which highlights a photography and video project.
Picto Fashion Photography Award – Picto Foundation
An exhibition devoted to the finalists and prizewinners in the Palais courtyard. Maxime Anthony, winner of the Filippo Roversi Grant 2023, was also showing a portfolio of his black and white works printed on ARCHES® Platine paper by Christophe Batifoulier, Platinum expert at PICTO. This portfolio is the fruit of an encounter between a young maker of images, an outstanding printer, a contact printing process with exceptional visual and tactile qualities and the Arches paper mill which backed the project.
Maxime Antony, winner of the Picto Fashion Photography Award Filippo Roversi Grant 2023
Maxime Antony was born in 1994 in the Drôme region of France and now lives and works in Paris. He is a self-taught photographer with a keen interest in the issues around digital image making and the ways it can be used to capture and depict the world.
Like an alchemist, he endeavours to discover, study, dissect, experiment with and transform digital images to create new points of view and new ways of telling stories. One of the key ideas behind his work is the augmentation of reality with the aim of better understanding the world around us and who we are. His photographs convey a dreamlike, ephemeral atmosphere. They often feature the memory of a moment, a dream, a person who has witnessed something and is remembering. Maxime Antony is showing us his reality, an in-between world.
“A transparent veil. Here is what takes shape and accompanies me on a daily basis to illustrate my earthly or dream journeys. It sharpens my gaze. It allows me to be in turn poetic, abstract or surrealist. It offers me a vision of a pictorial world, which I now want to tame, nourish and share.”
Maxime Antony.
“L’Encéphale”
L’Encéphale is an orchestra creating a harmony of movement between body and spirit. It produces melodies of our reflections, thoughts and dreams, giving life to a symphony of possibilities. It is the guardian of the secrets of life, a guide to our destinies. It walks a tightrope between the inner and outer worlds, the core of existence and the quintessence of what we are.
L’Encéphale is also the point at which our dreams meet reality. Nocturnal visions sometimes make their appearance in this compartment. The mental plane is then transformed into a stage with figures moving around on it. These are the creatures of our thoughts – thoughts of our creatures. The investigation starts here. These incongruous nocturnal figures are the result of a complex process: a tableau of memories, emotions and fears mingled and intertwined in unexplained ways. We alone can experience fully the reality of this dreamlike moment, because once recounted, this reality is already imperfect. We alone have the ability to solve the riddle of the dreams produced by our encephalon. We hold the key to our own dreams.
Working on images of dreams, analysing the inspiration and interpretation then means envisaging how a human being is apt to build their world and personality from their own dream experiences. Here Maxime Antony has sought to deal with the subject of the real, the unreal and the human body as a creature in its own right. It is all the fruit of a nocturnal imagination that has lulled him ever since the doors of the dream world opened to him.
