Jean-Michel Ducroux | Contemporary Artist: Artworks & Biography

At the age of 12, Jean-Michel received his first camera and discovered a passion for photography and a way to express himself.\n He began his career in the army photography department in Grenoble. As assistant director of BIF Productions in Paris, he collaborated on two medium-length films, one of which won the Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. He later became a freelance photographer, and worked for agencies such as Wallis, ID.com, Atsentzberger, Country Land, as well as for magazines such as La France Agricole or the Belgian national daily ‘Le Soir’ and ‘La Libre Belgique’. Today he devotes himself to chemical research on all photographic techniques.\n For Jean-Michel, photography is essentially pictorial. It is a way to approach subjects that are difficult to access. In this way he can capture (in 25 thousandths of a second) a person or a landscape in an instant that will never be repeated again. Only the photographer perceives and captures the moment forever.\n After capturing the moment, Jean-Michel excels in producing chemical reactions on his snapshots. The fruit of 18 years of research, he has developed various formulas (kept secret) which transform the photograph. No longer an accurate representation of reality, it becomes a personal interpretation of the moment as experienced by the artist.\n The result is carefully controlled by regulation of the different parameters (solvent, temperature, light), but is never reproduced identically and each piece is unique. The transformation process can take several days and is a true metamorphosis.\n The work of Jean-Michel is in the original definition of photography: ""making a surface sensitive to light."" With the help of chemistry he transcribes his own sensitivity to the surface of the photograph.