maxime ballesteros was born in Lyon, France. after studying in ERBASE (fine art school of St Etienne), maxime graduated in 2007 with a DNSEP (master diploma of art). His photographs have been featured in solo and group exhibitions in France, USA, Belgium, Russia, Germany,
Great Britain and Danemark. he has been based in Berlin since 2007.
his clients and publications include:
032c, Artforum, Ayn Magazine, Bright Magazine, Les Cahiers européens de l’imaginaire, Cover, Crush Fanzine, Das Magazine, Dazed Digital, Deutsch post, Diskurs, DSTM, Esquire, Flaneur, Flaunt, Foam, Harper’s Bazaar Arabia, i-D, Interview Germany, Intro, Jetzt Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Irène, Kinki Magazine, Louis Vuitton, MB! by Mercedes-Benz, Monocle, Monopol, Musikexpress, Neon (FR & DE), Nike, Novembre, Nowness, Philips, Passages Magazine, Purple Fashion Magazine, Saatchi Online, Sang Bleu, Sleek Magazine, Soho House Magazine, Style.com, Styleby, SugarHigh, Tank, Tissue Magazine, Twin, V Magazine, Vice Germany, Visions, Wire, Zeit Magazin, Zitty, Zoo Magazine, 7 For All Mankind, ...
Photographer Maxime Ballesteros has ‘provocative’ attached to his name. He captures the most intense and beautiful aspects of life – the climax of a party, sex and a fair amount of high heels and leather – in bright colours illuminated by a sharp, uncompromising flash. Originally from a small village near Lyon, Ballesteros now lives in Berlin, which he describes as “dangerous in the best way, in its freedom”. He photographs Berlin’s nightlife and his friends, though his pictures are only loosely connected to specific places and times. Playing with sexually-charged symbolism – leather, stockings, heels – his photos evoke debauched Renaissance paintings and early photographs of the decadent 20s and 80s. Creation and destruction, love and innocence, excess and debauchery – aspects fundamental to human nature – are all ever-present themes in his work.
Whatever his subject is, he manages to capture reality at its best, the perfect moment one wants to preserve forever. Ballesteros’ photographs are strong and honest statements sprinkled with only a constrasting hint of irony. Ahead of his upcoming show in Cologne, Dazed talked to Ballesteros about the perfect photo, nudity, and wandering strangers in latex bodysuits.
Anastasiia Fedorova
Maxime Ballesteros’s photographs share the same DNA as Kurt Cobain’s rough wail, Picasso’s sketches, Bill T. Jones’s walk and Raymond Carver’s sentences. They arise from common acts that people regularly perform, yet when they are realized through uniquely talented artists, they become profound. Ballesteros is a Lyon-born and Berlin-based photographer whose gritty images of rough reality evoke the work of Nan Goldin, Corinne Day, Larry Clark and Ryan McGinley. Like the products of legions of snappers inspired by these photographers’ intimate documentary imagery, Ballesteros’s portraits, still-lives and reportage have a raw immediacy. But unlike the countless copyists of the snap-shot aesthetic, his work genuinely shares the poetics, insight and empathy of the masters of his medium. His work, even his still-lives, pulses with an intense and genuine sexual charge and captivating empathy.
Glossy, processed, polished photography is much easier to produce than Ballesteros’s images. His portraits, including commercial images, offer striking insights into his sitters’ personalities. Inherent in his imagery is an awareness that the sitters are responding to him. The quality of rawness in his work comes less from its natural and loose look which strips sitters of their pretensions and reveals the humanity of their flaws and charms. Instead, it emanates from the sense that there is an intimate connection between Ballesteros and his subjects, and that the viewer is witnessing something fleeting and intensely private.
Ana Finel Honigman
Not that we could confirm, but we believe he sleeps with his camera. Firmly rooted in Berlin’s young and quirky art scene, he is bound to become something of an encyclopaedist of today’s Berlin.
Annika Von Taube
