Philippe Calandre is a French artist whose work is a combination of photography, painting and video.

Early life

Born in Avignon

Avignon

Avignon is a French commune in southeastern France in the départment of the Vaucluse bordered by the left bank of the Rhône river. Of the 94,787 inhabitants of the city on 1 January 2010, 12 000 live in the ancient town centre surrounded by its medieval ramparts.Often referred to as the...

 in 1964, he took to the seas at age 16 where he stayed on for two years as a shipman. This voyage, an initiation of sorts, covering the Northern Atlantic to the South Pacific sharpened his sensibilities, taught him an appreciation of open spaces thus allowing the elements to shape his spirit.

Back on terra firma for health reasons, never to go back out to sea, he tries to voyage by dabbling in painting, sculpture, music and especially photography, which he holds close to heart. The collection of photos by Brassaï

Brassaï

Brassaï was a Hungarian photographer, sculptor, and filmmaker who rose to international fame in France in the 20th century. He was one of the numerous Hungarian artists who flourished in Paris beginning between the World Wars...

 entitled Paris de nuit would inspire his work. He began by learning to touch up photos with an old salt of a photographer who lived in the neighbourhood, then on his own. His career as a photographer was beginning to take off.

During a banal portrait shoot he came to the realization that what he was looking at seemed to be more interesting to him through his lens than in reality. It was at this point that he realized that he would be an artist.

Professional career

Over the course of several years he shared his time between personal research, which had him globetrotting from Bolivia to Russia, and his work as a photographer in the press. This world, however, with its own specific photographic language began to wear on Calandre. He decided, at this point, to dedicate himself to a more artistic approach to photography where he could express himself freely.

After two exhibits in Paris and Beirut, a Parisian gallery, Zabriskie, decided to include his work alongside those of Weegee

Weegee

Weegee was the pseudonym of Arthur Fellig , a photographer and photojournalist, known for his stark black and white street photography....

 and Leonard Freed

Leonard Freed

Leonard Freed was a documentary photojournalist and longtime Magnum member. He was born to Jewish, working-class parents of Eastern European descent.-Career:...

 as part of its « Une nuit, un voleur » series (in 1996). A few years later, the National Fund for Contemporary Art acquired ‘Ghost Stations’, a series depicting abandoned gas stations that the artist came upon during his highway rambling.

Philippe Calandre is particularly interested in architectural photography and still life. In all his series, reality serves as the foundation from which he creates his own worlds where an ambiguity, or perhaps even a confusion, between the real and the imagined settles in. His studies often were used as a springboard to highlight everyday architectural aspects, pulled from their daily lifelessness and given life. Gas stations, then his ‘silos’, which were presented at FIAC in 2001 by Anne Barrault, the Parisian gallery, with whom the artist collaborated from 1999 to 2007, were lifted to the realm of the supernatural.

For ‘Insomnia’ (2006), which depicts strange nocturnal apparitions Calandre plunges into the world of the fantastic with his pure and spooky scenes.

As early as 1996, his various series have been displayed in galleries, museums and contemporary art shows in France and abroad from Greece to Argentina to the Netherlands and back to New York and Taiwan.

External links

• Official site
• Gallery of photos on Flickr
  Flickr
  Flickr is an image hosting and video hosting website, web services suite, and online community that was created by Ludicorp in 2004 and acquired by Yahoo! in 2005. In addition to being a popular website for users to share and embed personal photographs, the service is widely used by bloggers to...
  
  
• Philippe Calandre's work on the website of Anne Barrault
• The series "Insomnia"
• The series "Side of the Road"
• "Ad vitam aeternam" and other videos on YouTube
  YouTube
  YouTube is a video-sharing website, created by three former PayPal employees in February 2005, on which users can upload, view and share videos....