Benjamin Schmuck was born in Paris in 1989. He found his calling for photography at sixteen and started experimenting with its various techniques. He studied at Les Gobelins, the Parisian school of visual communication. His first photographic series were devoted to photographing the people closest to him. In Beyond the circle (2009), he captures his childhood friends’ coming of age in a quasi documentary manner. The result is a delicate depiction of this painful but ecstatic transitory state.
Later on, in the In spite of ourselves series (2011), he focuses on his Alsacian grand-father, who was forced into enlisting in the German army during World War II. By investigating the disarrayed lives of these men and women abused by History, he questions the legacy left to his generation.
Since then Benjamin has both stepped away from his initial documentary style and broadened the scope of his explorations. Indeed, after two years of production, came a new outlook on his body of work. Having perceived the emergence of an aesthetics edge to his pictures, he decided to fully embrace this photographic language, which led to The wave series.
Benjamin just started working on a new project, exploring how we relate to the sky and space.
To view more of Benjamin’s work, please visit his website.