introducing our collaborators, Cyril Berthault-Jacquier and Sébastien Redon Lévigne

Cyril Berthault-Jacquier is a Paris-born and Belgium-based photographer, poet and prolific collaborator. In his prevalently abstract and conceptual work, Cyril focuses on the harmony of colours and shapes, and the emotions they evoke. Using both film and digital cameras, he explores empty urban landscapes, aesthetic details and looks not at the moment of interaction between the human and the object, the human and the space, but the moments suspended between. His photographs, both self-portraits, landscapes and still-lives, are static, contemplative and focus more on what isn't said as much as what is represented in an image. 

As he said in an interview he gave to German artist Florian Schmidt, "I tell stories and I try to share them. Sometimes people see exactly what I intend to show, sometimes they see something different and it is a new source of inspiration for me. It is like describing a dream by means of photography, or modifying the reality of everyday life". 

Some of Cyril's favourite photographic forms are diptychs and kaleidoscopes, and as the inventor of the latter he uses it both as form to present his own work, but also as a way of cooperating with other artists and exploring how an image's aesthetic can be manipulated.

He has also published numerous books of poetry and photographs, including cooperations with other artists. Cyril also writes poems and poetic prose to accompany his and his fellow artists' photographs.

You can find Cyril's images on his page and follow his daily features on his Tumblr blog De Profundis.

Sébastien Redon Lévigne is a French photographer living in Lyon. He's a photo editor and works with a variety of tools and cameras, including a 4x5 KodakMasterview, Elioflex 2, different 35mm cameras and scanners.

Like many photographers, Sébastien has experimented with a variety of techniques and styles, but he often comes back to still life. Often using objects that hold some significance to himself, he uses these objects to project those "memories" onto us, the viewers. You can see examples of this in his series "nerfs" and still lives. He uses a very minamalist style, using only one flower petal, piece of fruit or object in an attempt to create and photograph his concept quickly, so not to lose the memory before he has comitted it to film. In another series "paysages de poussieres" ("dust landscapes"), Sébastien collected dust and fabric, then cut and assembled them to create miniture lanscapes he dreamed of inspired by the romatic paintings of Victor Hugo.

In 2008, he published a book of photographs "Noir presque transparent" ("Black almost transparent"), accompanied by the words of Cyril Berthault-Jacquier.

You can see Sébastien's work in his portofolio, on Art Limited and on his page.

Those of you lucky enough to speak French can also read an interview with Sébastien on the page of Forma, an art collective, and read more about him on the website of VOZ'Galerie.