The Others

The Others offers a virtual journey through India, one of the world's most most compartmentalized in the world but also the one whose visual production is of the most prolific. For this work, Olivier Culmann chose to use his own image to explore social fantasies and one's own questions on otherness. Passionate about popular imagery and staging codes of photography, he used as basic material a series of portraits reflecting the variety of elements constituting the identity of the individual according to his religion, his caste, his social class, his profession, his origin geographical. These portraits are available in a protean way and according to the different processes of iconographic creation practiced in India: portraits traditional in neighborhood photographic studios (see phase I); portraits using digital materials (phase II); recomposition and colorization of torn photographs (phase III); and the paintings made from photographs (page IV). With this work, Olivier Culmann explores the limits of photography and questions the development of social status through the construction of the image of self.Olivier CulmannBorn in 1970 in Paris, Olivier Culmann has been a photographer since 1992 and member of the Tendance Floue collective since 1996. His photography questions existence, always on the edge of the derisory and the absurd. His work is crossed by the recurring questions of freedom and conditioning. In the 1990s, he traveled to several countries in search of " worlds of school", a work on the school institution, the subjugations and the insubordinations that arise from them. In the aftermath of the attacks September 11, he directed "Autour, New York 2001-2002", a series devoted to the spectators after the event, Americans or tourists who came to scrutinize the ruins of the World Trade Center. Expressions captured by the photographer function as mirrors of our own shock in the face of catastrophe. The series "Watching TV" (2011) is a further step in his work. of a mise en abyme of the gaze: it immortalizes viewers from all over the world, scrutinizing the state of bodies and souls in the face of the echoes of the world filtered by the screens.