Jean-Baptiste Maitre is interested in producing and staging photography under
a certain critical perspective towards this medium. He considers photography
as a studio practice and tries not to shoot outside the studio in order to
have an opposite angle view to journalism and the global-mediatic-aspect of
this medium. His photo’s are based on computer work. He makes use of the same
tools as advertising agencies do: digital montage and retouching.
Paradoxically, he made this choice in order to remain honest in front of a
representation. The focus in his photographs and videos is shifted away from a
subject/text/story towards ‘basic’ light effects and sensuality of an image.
Jean-Baptiste Maitre was educated in Paris, at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure
des Beaux-Arts and the School of Studio Photography. In the ensuing years, he
gained a firm grounding in digital photo montage at well known advertising
agencies and fashion periodicals. At present he is a fine art researcher at
the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht. He will be associated with the
Rijksakademie in Amsterdam as resident artist from 2009. Maitre has
participated in exhibitions at FLACC, the workplace for visual artists in
Genk, Belgium and at the Kunstfabrik in Berlin.
Jean-Baptiste Maitre about his work:
A personal anthology of
mediatic images:
‘As a photographer but also as a spectator, I know
that when a photo-reporter shoots a subject, the image you see in a newspaper
in the end is different then what the author actually saw. But still something
is there in the photograph, and it tells you something. This thing is not
real, it’s the spectator’s creation, or fiction. It is his interpretation.
With this series of 7 photographs entitled A personal Anthology of mediatic
images, I did not want to be a photographer. I just wanted to do photography,
without pretending giving back the truth of the world to you, my readers. So I
asked some people to choose a subject for me: I asked them to describe images
that they had liked in the media (in newspaper or else where), and that they
remembered, for any reason. I have then reproduced (with the help of the same
5 or 6 actors) these mediatic images in a studio, following these written
descriptions. It’s hard to see what was the original subject that these images
were talking about in the re-enacted ones, because the descriptions were so
subjective that the original topic has vanished or blurred. In a way, these
images are left-overs of newspaper readers’.
BackLitBlackCoke
‘Well, here it is, the coffee machine you know
well. And the can distributor. These things are always there for you when you
work, it is also there for me, when I work. And again, there are images on it,
but you don’t really see it anymore, it’s more of a presence that tells you
“hot coffee here”, or “fresh sodas there”.
It’s kind of pretty with colors, and there’s light that pops out of it.
Without this light, it would tell you “no coffee” or “no coke”, but also no
warmth or no cool. It produces a kind of elemental language that doesn’t
really need words to touch its users, but it needs to have a presence.
BackLitBlackCoke is a raw image, with no message, but you might already be
acquainted with it’.
