Quentin Devillers

Quentin Devillers grew up surrounded by fine art and audiovisual productions, and he didn’t escape his educational fate: the art of framing the light. Having practiced photography since his youngest years, he has experimented with a huge variety of ways to capture the instant from Stenope to medium-format, but his need to focus on content more than the technicality lead him, in his recent work, to use principally a digital camera. Being the director of photography in different areas of the cinematographic industry allowed him to build his own vision but also to travel, to encounter different kinds of light, landscapes and cultures. If photography allows an introspective look on our deepest desires, we can easily interpret his works as a willingness to come back to a solitary, wild state of human being. Isolating his subject – often evidence of humanity’s failure – by the framing or light allows him to live by procuring a feeling of loneliness, and then to share this feeling. His references and influence include Gustav Klimt, Edouard Vuillard, David Hockney, Paul Thomas Anderson, Xavier Dolan, Andreas Gursky, Chris Buck, Alex Cretey Systermans, Bernd and Hilla Becher.

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Panamerica

I have always been fascinated by the abandoned places where the nature take over the human. During one of my journey on the path of the remains of the Cold War I found this abandoned military buildings on the north coast of Panama. During the second half of the 20th century, this is where United States of America provided military training for government personnel, rebels and dictators of US-Allied Latin American nations. Shooting this place with a classic architectural approach allowed me to put in contrast the clean composition with the nasty history of the place. I tried to leave enough space for the imagination of the audience. Fort Sherman was used as “Jungle Operation Training Center” from 1951 to 1999. (pictures 1,2,3) Fort Gulick was the “School of the Americas”, specifically for the Cold War goal of teaching “anti-communist” counterinsurgency training to military personnel of Latin American countries from 1946 to 1984, included the uses of torture (pictures 4, 5, 6, 7). Fort de Lesseps was used as coastal defense from 1913 to 1955 (pictures 8, 9, 10).

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To view more of Quentin’s work, please visit his website.