Jean-Michel Berts, The Cities - A Special Carbon Print Series
Sous les Etoiles Gallery is thrilled to introduce a new series of black and white carbon pigment prints from the French photographer Jean-Michel Berts. His unique vision of mystifying light compliments the carbon pigment's rich deep blacks and infinitely subtle tonal variations. The tactile surface quality of the prints pays homage to the handcrafted beauty of the early twentieth century Pictorialist movement.
The Cities work of Jean-Michel Berts began nearly ten years ago, almost by accident. “I was in Venice and the Piazza San Marco was flooded. I didn’t plan to take any images, but the atmosphere was so exceptional that I could not resist,” he remembers. Returning to Paris, he discovered the film inside his camera was black and white, not color as he had thought. It was at that moment when he rediscovered the pleasures of working in black and white.
Jean-Michel Berts collects the essence of cities in his body of work called City Portraits. His glance is there to remind us of the grandeur of civilizations. The abstraction of characters makes it possible to put human construction forward and thus reanimate timelessness. Whether Paris, New York, Venice, London or Tokyo, through his eyes these sublimated cities take on a poetic, ethereal and dreamlike value. Jean-Michel Berts prefers to take pictures early in the morning because, as he likes to say, “during this period of time, crossing emotions, feelings and atmosphere, this is always when the images come to me.”