BLUES, FROM MY HEAD DOWN TO MY SHOES, Self-Portraits as Bluesmen.

THE GENESIS : For half a century I have been listening to American blues musicians. I collect their recordings, their photographs, the books and films about their lives. I go to their concerts, I visit places where they were born and where they lived. I play their music on instruments similar to those with which they performed. So I naturally wanted to pay tribute to the greatest names of “the most influential music of the 20th century.” And since I have attempted for a long time to duplicate the way they sound, why not also take on their appearance for the duration of a photo session. THE PROJECT : For my precedent series, FEELIN’ BLUE, told in a graphic novel manner, I collected all the necessary visual information to depict in context well known personalities in the history of the blues : physical appearance, choice of clothing, attitudes, type and model of instruments. From the daily “company” of all these characters arose the desire, in addition to the stories that I was recreating, to produce a gallery of portraits without any storytelling purpose. THE DOCUMENTATION : In order to more accurately appreciate the personality of each of my subjects, I of course listened to their music again with renewed pleasure, looked at a large number of their historic photographs and every time it was possible studied existing cinematographic documents. I had to acquire a thorough sense of each personality so that I could synthetize it into a single image more than for the series of stories told in sequence of several images. To me this synthesis is the essence of the subtle discipline of the photographic portrait. THE IMPLEMENTATION : Once I had absorbed the characteristics of my subjects, I embodied them in front of the camera, taking poses that could have been their own. I then digitally modified my features to bring them closer to those of each bluesman and thus reinforce the resemblance. THE FINAL RENDITION : The last step of the process was a graphic treatment of the images : a four level equidensity with manual coloring of the two median levels.