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Photography
Todd Hido
toddhido.com
His suburban houses shot at night through a fogged-up windshield made me want to photograph abandonment without wallowing in it: just a light, a façade, and everything we project onto them.
Inspirations
A few photographers and artists whose work feeds mine — what I look for in it, what I try to keep.
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Documentary photography
Alec Soth
alecsoth.com
Sleeping by the Mississippi is still my reference for photographic road trips: faces and landscapes that tell a country's story without ever explaining it.
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Staged photography
Gregory Crewdson
gagosian.com
Every image feels like a freeze-frame from a film you've never seen. That cinematic, almost unsettling tension is exactly what I'm after in Collapsus.
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New Topographics
Robert Adams
fraenkelgallery.com/artists/robert-adams
His cold, precise way of photographing landscapes damaged by human hands, without judgment or pathos, taught me that you can be critical while staying quiet.
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Black-and-white photography
Josef Koudelka
magnumphotos.com/photographer/josef-koudelka
Wall struck me with the way it turns black and white into a territory of its own — harsh, taut, uncompromising. A lesson in framing.
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Landscape photography
Ansel Adams
anseladams.com
His prints of Yosemite and the American West, with their incredible precision and depth of gray, are still my absolute reference whenever I set out to shoot Les Paysages.
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Black-and-white photography
Sebastião Salgado
polkamagazine.com/photographe/sebastiao-salgado
His black and white has a density and contrast I haven't seen anywhere else — a way of sculpting light that gives every image an almost physical weight.
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Conceptual photography
Hiroshi Sugimoto
sugimotohiroshi.com
His Seascapes — the same horizon line repeated endlessly through long exposures — showed me that absolute stillness can be a subject in itself. My reference for Les Océans.
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Japanese photography
Masahisa Fukase
michaelhoppengallery.com
His Ravens (Karasu) series, with its instinctive framing and raw grain, taught me to trust the instant rather than a perfect composition.
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Portrait & color
Stéphane Lavoué
stephanelavoue.fr
His almost hyperrealist, painterly rendering proves color can carry as much weight as black and white. A reference for the light and texture in my color work.
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Miniature stagings
Frank Kunert
frank-kunert.de
His absurd, meticulously built miniature scenes gave me a taste for the detail that derails everything — slipping something off-kilter into an image that first looks perfectly normal.
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Animal portraiture
Nick Brandt
nickbrandt.com
His trilogy On This Earth, A Shadow Falls, Across the Ravaged Land showed me you could carry the codes of human portraiture — tight framing, sepia, intimacy — into a completely different subject. Photographing an elephant the way you'd photograph a face.