Interviews / Stories
Biography: Photographer Daniel Decot (Belgium)
I am a Belgian Photographer based in Mons.
My quest ? ... Foremost, catch a « simple » picture, the simpler the better.
The content.
I like capturing real people more than posing supermodels and whenever possible, in their home place, so they feel more at ease since evolving in their environment.
I prefer the release during a session so I give privilege to loosening over acting.
« Don’t do, don’t act, don’t pose, do nothing », no drama effect but just a look, a presence, the raw drawing of a gesture, a growing thought.
An intense yet discreet emotion, nearly mute and blind which tends to reveal a true moment, unutterable, subtle and far away from bashing clichés and sensationalism.
No show off, no distortion. No voyeurism. No transgression.
End purpose being to suggest intimacy and not to steal it from the subject.
A meeting, some shared instants.
A caring look from my ends.
A deeper look on the inside from yours.
My approach based on a certain neutrality emphasizes the mystery, creating impressionistic images leaving to the audience the possibility to picture its own story.
The shape.
Whilst keeping classic, I try to stay away from true crude realism to avoid anchoring my pictures in a social or psychological typology and continuously stretch to reach a poetic realism alike the one of the 1930’s- 40’s movies (Renoir, Carné/Prévert) and their transfiguration of the reality.
Working with natural daylight, (ea.: available light) and inside, my pictures swing between two worlds.
That of a contrasted Black & White alike the one of the German expressionism movement which affects space dramatically, some Chiaroscuro from which faces and shadow-striped bodies strive to hide or escape.
And another tainted world, a zone with diffuse and glowing light, a Sfumato in the subtle gray scale where individual finds their way, eventually melting within.
In both cases, the day-to-day ceases to exist, the momentum suspends its time.
« Here and now »
I always go shooting unplanned, adapting to the environment and its unexpected circumstances. The light conditions, the room constraints are of interest to me and force me to cope with all contingencies, composing my picture on the exact moment.
More than a present instant, I prefer mentioning a present space.
A place does live, tells stories, as important to me as the one of the person living in.
So ... NO studio.
Unveil / Reveal (Strip naked / Get a bare)
A face, a look, a body, a room.
My personae have a link with those of Edward Hopper’s paintings, for being solitary, melancholic, mute and wholly-engrossed in their thoughts, locked within, alone and nude facing a window letting the light floating in and suggests the possibility of an infinite world lying behind, on the other side.
And like always, wriggling from famous artists to anonymous people, swinging from boxers to geeks, oscillating from straight managers to tattooed bikers, …trying to suggest what unites us in our differences, and shedding light on our identities and resemblances through our skin grains, up to the most intimate as I would like that the audience seizes the humanity beyond the characters.