Born in 1958 in Byblos, I’ve lived in Paris since 1975. And though I feel deeply tender toward the city where my life began, I have a passion for the one which, for forty-five years now, has never failed to impress my eyes, my spirit and my heart.
I attended university at the Sorbonne (Paris-IV): classic and modern literature, history, philosophy, esthetics, art history. My doctoral thesis on La Fontaine led to the publication of a study on that author (La Fontaine, Le Seuil Editions).
Working as rewriter, the editor of an encyclopedia, and managing editorial projects, all led me to collaborate with photographers, then to make photographic documentaries myself, including portraits of authors (Opale Agency), and to produce the covers of musical scores (Symétrie Editions).
Over the last fifteen years, I have devoted most of my time to writing and photography, centering my attention on the artistic image, its status and powers. On the one hand, literary works: La Peinture représentée (Hazan Editions, with Natacha Pernac, 2013), Le Livre dans la peinture (Citadelles et Mazenod Editions, 2015), , L’art et le nombre (Hazan Editions, 2021). On the other, a photographic quest centered on urban scenes.
I was lucky to perfect my technique and train my eye and critical acumen at the Paris-Val de Bièvres Photo Club. As to my first exhibits, dating from 2011, I owe them to Irma Toudjian, Artistic Director at Suoni e Pause (Cagliari, Italy), who set into motion a dynamic that only grows stronger with time.
Today, I am happy to collaborate with Christophe Boïcos in Paris (Chris Boïcos Fine arts), and with Myeong-Hee Kim (director of the Parisian gallery Beauté du Matin Calme) in Corea and Japan.
My taste is for an esthetic of beauty – a sensitive beauty, neither cold nor futile. The ideal of harmony distances me from reality that would be too raw or too neuralgic, as well as from any purely intellectual exercise. And, all things considered, I believe that hedonism, which is reflected in my love of colour, does not contradict favoring the meditative life.
So far, my photographic production has focused in three directions. The first (Rain Painting) adds to the photographic prism the natural prism of rain. The second (fantasy fictions around streetlights) explores the photographic medium through the famous Flare. The third is street photography (readers, lovers, passers-by), while sometimes echoing my writing activity.