Antoine Eric

Eric Antoine was born in 1974.
At the age of 20 he left France for the first time to meet his best friend in New York. A few days later his friend kicked him out of his place but he met a way more reliable companion: his first Nikon Fm2 and a Kodak triX film. Eric Antoine is a self taught photographer who has been exploring the possibilities of analog photography along many years of traveling around the world, documenting his adventures and encounters.
15 years and thousands of magazine pages later, his life took a sudden turn and as most of it was spent in the chaos of cities and the overwhelmed life of a contemporary citizen, facing the complexity of the world, he decided to switch back to something slower and authentic. In 2012, Willem Vleugels shows a slice of this life in the documentary « a quiet riot ». After dedicating three years to the ensemble seul project, presented in 2013
in Paris, Éric Antoine has unveiled Black mirror in 2014, which takes him from a previously autobiographical point of view
to a broader examination of society.
Like those of ensemble seul, these new images are the product of the painstaking wet collodion process. This fragile alchemy combines glass and photosensitive magic
to create a delicate and enigmatic object.
Antoine guides us through an intimate world: a universe of silvery reflections, singular objects and isolated individuals. Produced in isolation, each work was shot within 100 meters of his bed.
With Black mirror, he takes us on an introspective journey to consider the place of the individual in a society in thrall to excess. He draws attention to what we
tend to neglect due to lack of time, and
denounces sensationalism in all its forms.
Antoine’s choice of the wet collodion process is far from trivial. In addition to offering the opportunity to pursue technical and aesthetic perfection, the use of this technique today implies a temporal game between contemporary images and relics from the dawn of photography.
Black Mirror celebrates beauty in its simplicity: lonely individuals, and the obsolete yet nonetheless exceptional objects of everyday life. This contemplative aesthetic has been achieved by exploring different definitions of time: historical time, exposure time, measured time. These photographs, whose large formats require careful staging, are imbued with ambiguity, suggesting that the stories hinted at in each image have yet to be completed.