WHO?
My name is Pierre Belhassen, I was born and raised in Paris and currently live in Marseille, France. After studying cinema, I started taking pictures in 2006. After a long apprenticeship in analog black and white, I started working in color in 2012. Today I work as a freelance photographer.
WHAT?
People, either their shadows, or their tracks. I like narrative images that include people. I am fascinated by the “theater of life”; people’s attitudes and actions through different contexts. For me to photograph is more to recognize than to see, it is what I try to do while walking the streets: to find a passage between the reality of the moment and my own universe.
WHEN?
I can go whole months without photographing, then devote every minute of my time to shooting. I can photograph a lot in a relative and short period of time. Outside these periods I try to distance myself from photography by turning myself to other practices.
WHERE?
Wherever there’s something to see, I mean Everywhere. I photograph by intuition. The atmosphere of a place first, then shapes, colors and vibrations which collapse into energy; some call it inspiration. It could be anywhere, you never know where you’ll meet yourself.
WHY?
For me nothing is better than photographing life, it’s like diving into the moment, synchronizing your heartbeat with the energy of life. I like to hunt for something I don’t know, looking for the accident, the fragility of a situation and try to orchestrate all that within the frame. For a few years, I’ve been trying to build up my own language, and I must say that bringing that to maturity is a considerable job. At the end of the day, it’s all about observation and the deepest thing behind it, being there, right here, right now.
