This summer a collaborative project called Paso Doble, involving myself and an artistic associate, saw its first public outing, with an exhibition in Nantes. I’d like to retrace with you the birth and evolution of this project, and in so doing try to delve into the workings of our creative process.
GENESIS
15 years ago, I received a call from Nathalie Mineau, graphic designer and art director, with whom I’d had just one or two previous contacts, enquiring whether I was interested in collaborating on a big job she was being commissioned for by ArcelorMittal.
I remember the sense of excitement, but also of trepidation that followed. Why had she chosen me? I’d never worked in the industrial sector; I had no experience of such a wide-ranging assignment for such a prestigious client.
A year later, following an exhibition of the pictures at a company gathering in Deauville and the publication of the magazine “The Face of Distribution Solutions”, I felt an obvious sense of pride and achievement.
Perhaps, most significantly, a special creative bond had been formed with Nathalie. Not only had she entrusted in my photographic vision, but she had also made my pictures come to life on the printed page, in ways I hadn’t imagined possible before.
Her design skills played with the geometry of my compositions, created a sense of movement running through the publication and also, perhaps most importantly, captured a sense of fun.
Jump forward 10 years and we are just emerging from the unprecedented experience of COVID.
For me, the period was a liberating one creatively and people responded very positively to what they sensed was a new type of artistic expression.
I was determined to keep this creative fire burning, to make sure that the pleasure of taking pictures for pleasure endured, beyond the returning need to earn my living through photography.
I instinctively felt that collaborating with Nathalie, could be a fruitful experience.
Just as I had been pursuing my personal passion for street photography with renewed vigour, so she had been making a conscious and determined effort to revive her creative energy through her first love, illustration.
EXPERIMENTATION
At the outset, just as a kind of enjoyable experiment, we wanted to see if it was possible to set illustration alongside street photography and create some communication between the two.
We started making combinations of the two practices, from recent, existing work. The process, to begin with, was definitely more miss than hit, but when there was a match, the result was very gratifying.
Almost by chance we’d struck upon a visual experience which was immediate and striking, enabling two distinct media to interact and dialogue with one another, as though they were meant to be seen as one.
There seemed to be an obvious association of colours, forms and gestures, but was it possible to go out into the real world, so to speak, and produce such combinations on demand?
On and off, for the next couple of years, we covered public events and personal moments, working individually and separately on our creations, but thereafter combining to produce associations of images that worked as some sort of shared experience. Once again, the results were uneven, but when it did come together, as with the funeral of the Queen, the synchronicity was surprising and impressive.
By now we felt that the project had a definite future and so created a name for our joint artistic output – Paso Doble – reflecting a collaboration in movement. At the same time we uploaded our work in progress to the Adobe Behance platform, to provide a structure to our output, adding our personal commentaries to the visual associations.
Over the last 18 months, with less time available to go out and produce new work for Paso Doble, I delved once more into the archives, looking to try out new combinations and ascertain what really made our best associations click.
Viewing Nathalie’s illustrations again with a new eye, I uncovered a new range of possibilities. Having previously focused on our joint use of vibrant colours, I started to realise that it was overall harmony that mattered and so pairing black & white with colour was often just as effective. I, moreover, began to be more aware of certain details in her work that brought to mind particular features in my own pictures. Associations of lines, shapes and textures came to the fore.
I had reached the understanding that the alchemy of creative collaboration was twofold. Like in any coming together of two people, there needs to be a feeling of commonality for the couple to function. However, there must also be a sense of respectful difference and finding the right balance between similarity and separateness was key to a successful and enriching association. In other words, the whole needed to be greater than the sum of its parts.
In the combination below, I enjoyed the way a fairly simple, light-hearted portrait of a young woman on a Prague metro, suddenly gained more elegance and sophistication, when set alongside Nathalie’s wonderful Indian ink drawing. It appeared as though magically we could have a front and rear view of the same person. This blurring of real and imagined worlds was, it seemed to me, at the essence of our creative expression.
The ongoing search for striking visual dialogues began to resemble more and more the hunt for missing pieces in a puzzle. The creative process being like a game was important to me and conferred on the creations the sense of spontaneity and vitality.
EXHIBITION
In spring of this year, we learned that a new artistic event was going to be held in Nantes over 3 weeks in June and July.
Our work was enthusiastically selected for Atoflow-l’Art en Mouvement, and we had the pleasure of seeing the accumulated efforts spread over the last 4 years, finally come to life for an exhibition at the Petits Joueurs, a cultural bistro in Nantes.
The response on opening night was very positive, and it was satisfying to see friends and strangers alike, observing the pictures with a smile on their face.
Both myself and Nathalie, firmly believe our work is not designed to convey a particular message, but to appeal directly to the viewer at an instinctive level, enabling them to construct their own stories and emotional reactions.
The setting turned out to be well-suited for our production. The crossover nature of our creations chimed instinctively with the ambitions of Hordax, the new owner of the establishment, to create a multi-purpose venue, accommodating a bistro, a space for performing and visual arts, as well as a games area. He praised the mature nature of our collaboration, highlighting its playful spirit, the complementarity of our visual voices, and pinpointed a certain cinematographic quality in our production.
At the end of this first public showing for Paso Doble Project, I would draw two personal conclusions.
Firstly, that as a Street Photographer, my output is, at its most basic interpretation, a collection of random, isolated moments that have no particular connection one to another. Developing a joint project with Nathalie has enabled me to see my pictures anew in the form of a series and this has brought in many ways a new purpose to my craft.
Secondly, the work presented in the exhibition is a selection of visual associations that have ostensibly come together by chance. Many viewers were surprised to learn that the matching of photo and illustration had not emerged from a more deliberate sense of planning and intention.
It is fascinating and indeed revealing that two images that join so seamlessly were not created for that particular purpose. I firmly believe that the creative process is always to some degree a mixture of construction and luck. Paso Doble has evolved along several paths and this iteration remains for me as legitimate as any other we have explored.
This first exhibition has proved to be a significant step for Paso Doble and here’s looking forward to taking our dance of photography and illustration onwards along its unique journey.
