Patrice Picard
Small shops (Series)
DESCRIPTION
It is five years I have been walking around towns and villages across France, looking for these small shops. Whenever I found one, I made a portrait of it, usually full-face and full-length, and added it to my collection, a modest Atget-like inventory of a form of popular culture.
In these pictures, there is no one around and yet, in all of them, I can strongly feel some human presence. These shop windows are like faces telling us about human stories, both individual and collective, past or still present. Beyond their old-fashioned beauty, I can make out ingenious lives of work, self-assertive or more humble personalities, desires that have been fulfilled or have faded away.
Leaving a trace is a way of paying homage to them but also of acknowledging their persistence in our contemporary world and making room for them in our collective imagination.
AUTHOR
After practising photography as a hobby since my teenage years, I bought a digital camera ten years ago and set out on new ground, with a different approach. The works of such photographers as Stephen Shore, Lewis Baltz, Alexander Gronsky, Eugène Atget, Raymond Depardon, Philippe Bazin or Thibault Cuisset have deeply inspired and stimulated me over the past years.
My own work has developed around several topics : urban landscape, rural landscape, industrial architecture, but also all the small things that are around us and which we tend to ignore as they seem trivial, outdated or discarded.
In November 2020 I published my first book, “Small shops” .
Awards:
- 2022 Head On Landscape Award Semi-finalist
- 2021 TIFA PX3 Silver winner (Architecture-Cityscape Category)
- 2021 BIFA Honorable Mention (Architecture-Cityscape Category)
- 2020 FAPA Nominee (Landscape Category)
- 2019 TIFA Gold winner (Architecture-Industrial Category)
- 2019 FAPA Nominee (Architecture Category)
Exhibitions:
- 2023 Trieste Photo Days festival
Publications:
- 2022 contribution “Coastal” by Photo Book Now
- 2021 Monolyto n°24, "Negozi e vetrine", ISBN 9 798543 446652
- 2020 "Boutiques et devantures" self-published book, 1st print of 200 copies
- 2020 contribution "Car Habitats" by The Image Guide
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