Let’s continue for another day the photographic thread started yesterday with the Guy Bourdin post to focus on another artist and photographer who is being remembered this year with a book about his work, the late Sébastien Meunier.
Born in Nancy, France in 1970, Meunier divided between Paris and Salon-de-Provence, devoting himself to the art of photography since he was a teenager.
A graduate of Paris’ Ecole des Gobelins, he contributed to quite a few magazines, including Wad, Marie-Claire, Dépêche Mode, Trax and Trace, while also shooting advertising campaigns for prominent agencies. The recipient of many awards, he prematurely died in a road accident in Namibia in 2002 leaving behind a relatively small yet interesting corpus.
Steidl is releasing in August a volume about Meunier's works entitled Visual Pollution that seems to echo in its title Virilio’s statement about images contaminating us like viruses, polluting our eyes and minds. I have seen a preview copy of the volume and I think it's the sort of book that will prove interesting for photographers, but also graphic designers.
Meunier mixed different influences in his works, from music to cinema and often put emphasis in his images on the human body, but also on violence and death.
The opening image - taken in what looks like a warehouse full of mysterious dummies among which it is possible to spot a (probably dead) human being - seems to perfectly summarise Meunier's fascination with the human body.
In his images kids in swim gear are juxtaposed to images of frogs, young men with bodies covered in tattoos or incorporating subdermal
implants hint at body modification, while a skeleton seems to be haunting the busy streets of a Japanese metropolis.
Popular brands and logos often appear in ironic illustrations - showing a Star Wars imperial soldier with its armour branded by the Nike swoosh, an alien from Mars Attacks! and an ape from Planet of the Apes in Adidas and Puma spacesuits - or in darkly surreal shots: a Nike shoe is displayed in a glass jar, next to another jar containing a fetus; a body clad in sportswear lies at the bottom of a flight of steps while a Prada bag hides the head of a man tied to a chair.
Meunier's most poetical images remain his last ones taken in Namibia, showing an astronaut in desolately bare landscapes. In the book the images are very aptly followed by an extract from Antoine de Saint-Exupery's The Little Prince.
Meunier's fascination with death, dummies and human body alterations makes me think about a few scenes from Mario Bava's Il rosso segno della follia (Hatchet for the Honeymoon, 1970).
I'm embedding a clip from the film at the end of this post (check it out after 05:30 to spot the dummies), hoping it will inspire ideas for Meunier-like photo shoots involving visual deceptions, dichotomies between animate bodies and inanimate dummies, body alterations, fashion and death.
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