Bertrand Bodin Photographer

For Bertrand Bodin, the act of photography is both intellectual and instinctive.

Intellectual, because it requires technical mastery, reading light and composition and also a certain ability to conceptualise his image. Instinctive, because when the shutter is released, the photographer forgets everything to enter a world beyond the world. A photograph must bear witness to a personal vision, the interpretation of a thought, an emotion, a desire to say something, to invent his own language, to write a message, to give us something to see and feel beyond the image.

Bertrand Bodin uses a wide range of photographic techniques. He has no qualms about combining film, digital, black-and-white and colour, depending on what he wants to achieve. A lover of instant photography, he has long used Polaroid film in all its forms for artistic purposes in his landscape images: manipulation on SX70 Time Zero film, image transfer or gelatine transfer. Polaroid film offers infinite creative potential. Having an instantly developed print in front of him facilitates freer, more experimental approaches.
A pioneer of digital photography, he uses it for his sketchbooks, the final stage being the Polaroid reproduction of his digital prints or his silver prints." Bertrand Bodin's work is entirely devoted to spaces: Alpine spaces in particular, whose variations he tirelessly observes under the backdrop of the seasons or the subtle path of light.
Demanding, passionate, a tireless craftsman, this dewy gobbler of calm mornings and blazing dawns, this candle-breather of sunsets with their faint lights, this scavenger of ephemeral jewels sleeps among the stones, grasses, animals and simple people composing a new texture "His inn is in the Big Dipper" as the poet would have said.

Here, everything is seen in a wider context, in a more universal time, in a perspective: that of a world to be experienced, to be seen, and therefore to be understood.

The work of a photographer is the work of a grinder; you have to have sharpened your eye for a long time before you can sharpen that of others.

There is all the modesty of the craftsman in this work, which is entirely devoted to spaces, the natural spaces of the Alps in particular. There is all the lightness of an emotion when it has to signify perseverance and the unfathomable journey of the interiorisation of things seen, experienced, sought after that pass through this lightening of the moment when it becomes eternity. Bertrand Bodin can continue to look nature in the face.

The work of photographer Bertrand Bodin, on the materials of the landscape, produces more than ever its weight of universality.

© Claude Dautrey