Laurent Paillier
photographer
Le Pictorium Agency
Paris, France
Laurent Paillier’s haunting photography explores the body as a blank canvas, in all its impressionability and sensuality. Although his specialty is dance photography, Paillier’s camera never feels secondary to the live performance, because he does not try to capture the experience of watching dance. Instead, his images are the kind of singular moments that can only be reached with the intimacy and attentiveness of a photographer’s eye. Telling, immersive details are constantly captured and highlighted for our interest as dancer after dancer is caught in the air, mid-fall, and our attention is directed subtly but persuasively to their motions and their meaning. Against theatrical costumes and minimal lighting, the smallest details inform the painted gestures.
Paillier was born in France and dedicated himself to modern dance photography early in his career, in Paris. In his latest work, he tests the boundaries of the dance form by asking, as he describes it, “the dancers to express themselves beyond the human limit.”
- Arts
- Environment
- Landscape
- Still life