CLAUDE DEGOUTTE

For 30 years I directed corporate films and I love images in movement, but photography has always been for me a simpler and more emotional method for recounting daily life... And there is also the permanence of the support: it’s nice to be able to come back to black and white negatives or slides and find the emotions there still completely intact...

The street and street art. Since 1977 I have always had a camera in my backpack and the spectacle of the street is unending: all you have to do is stroll.

For 10 years now I have been making square photos: it’s obviously ideal for Instagram, but also fantastic for making mosaics of square images on specific themes, bringing together in one view a hundred striking images...

After the mosaics on art, cinema, graphic novels and comics, cartoons, music, and literature, I would like to begin a mosaic about the “history of the world” in 100 photos and another on “photography”!

On my first contact sheet from 1977: Andy Warhol signing his book The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) in the impasse des Bourdonnais and further away on the same contact sheet are Nico and Philippe Garrel... Impossible to imagine better sources of inspiration: pop art, music, cinema...

During my walks in Paris, I love to stroll with no particular goal in mind and discover on the walls the new creations of street artists, who are ever younger and ever more numerous. And capture in the flash of an instant, passers-by moving in front of these fleeting works without even seeing them...

None, I’m not in the mood for that sort of thing.

Participating in the exhibition Gainsbourg et caetera for the 30th anniversary of Gainsbourg’s passing with mosaics of 36 images (Galerie One Toutou, Marché Dauphine, Puces de Saint-Ouen)... A fourth book on street art for October Paris (seen through) Street Art which tells the history of Paris through the works in situ which refer to historical events, writers, painters, films, etc. A whole program!

Victor Hugo’s own motto: “To wander is human, to stroll is Parisian.”

Man Ray’s, Noire Et Blanche from 1926, of course!