Artist
Romain Bagnard
Graduated in Political Science, Romain Bagnard resides in Lyon (France) and has been practicing photography for twenty years in a self-taught way. He recently completed this course with two workshops in the framework of the Rencontres de la photographie d'Arles with Paolo Nozzolino and Patrick Le Bescont.
Since the beginning of 2020, he is now fully dedicated to his photographic activity. This year he exhibited an excerpt from his series Dystopia at the Halles du Faubourg in Lyon and participated in a group exhibition around Dante’s Hell at the Polo Museale Santo Spirito in Lanciano (Italy). Recently selected by GUP magazine to be part of Fresh Eyes 2020 talents that bring together 100 emerging European photographers in a book published in July 2020. His series The Shelter was exhibited at the Athens Photo Festival 2020 and will be at Photographiques du Mans in spring 2021. In January 2021, Fisheye magazine published a large portfolio of its Médusa series. He's been recently shortlisted for the Gomma Grant 2021.
aphrós
This series came into being at first within the boiling energy of Exarchia (Athens), then it deployed its matrix in many - sided elsewhere which bear the imprints, the gaps and the elements of resistance of a society on its last leg. Here the opaque signs of a primitive ephemeral urban alphabet come to the surface. There delicate, shivering skins come modestly into view, the fragile delight of life fighting to survive. This work is a polysemous corpus set into deep, contradictory fows. Colours and materials, lines and faces, signified and significant jostle together here, they come to the surface from the very bustling depths of our towns and of our bodies just like foam on gale days.
By nominating Romain Bagnard, Céline Croze, Julie Glassberg and Eleni Onasoglu for Futures talents 2021, TPF unveils the group of emerging European photographers and their works with a strong visual identity that result from the capacities to develop long-term personal projects throughout deep researches to define an individual photographic writing, to build a coherence between the content and the shape the photo project is supposed to take in its final version.
Between Celine Croze ’s SQEVNV that focuses on social issues and human bodies as territories; Julie Glassberg’s Dekotora - a saga of misunderstood subculture of heavily decorated trucks in Japan; Aphros by Roman Bagnard who brings to surface the opaque signs of a primitive ephemeral urban alphabet and Eleni Onasoglu’s Hippocampus – a visual diary, a coded memory map that leads to an inner journey to explore the time and the emotions – TPF gives to discover 4 artists with very different photographic writings who re-invent their individual visual codes, overcome their vulnerability and transgress the reality they look at into the images that attract by their multilayerness of meanings and sensuality.
Text by Nestan Nijaradze