After a successful career in the cinema industry, Bruno Nuytten dropped it in 2001 for several reasons, including the desire to reconnect with the world around him, after being locked away for too long in world dedicated to fiction.

By reconnecting with photography after a more than 10 years break, he immerses himself into the visual world again, halfway between reality and fiction.

In 2016, he began assembling a photographic journal as part of his work with Le Fresnoy, the National Studio of Contemporary Arts in Tourcoing, France. It is where he exhibits for the first time, thought on installation of 1000 photographs displayed on ten 55 inch screens. He will then continue his exhibitions with other photography series across France but also in Italy, Spain, and most recently in Poland at Camerimage.

This year at the Centre of Contemporary Art in Toruń, Bruno Nuytten is exhibiting photographs of unknown people in unknown places, taken with his iPhone, purely and simply because it is a camera he always carries with him.

The pictures taken are part of the things that catch his attention on a daily basis, of reality and of what seems familiar to him. He edits all of his photographs from his phone and out of respect for the people whose pictures are taken, he aims to always make them unrecognisable. Thus, while remaining a capture of reality, it barely grazes the imaginary.

Through numerous edit handling and signal distortions, he wishes to reproduce as accurately as possible the feeling overwhelming him during the snapshot, then share it to keep these short-lived emotions engraved. He finds his way there mainly through the low definition medium and artefacts, hoping to make feel rather than to make understand.

Passé simple

De retour

The exhibited photographs give off a similar energy to one another, contributing to a fertile and mastered symbiosis, all singularly different, they are also very similar in style and content.

In their 70x50cm vertical format printed on thick cotton, they reveal more or less distinguishable scenes, rather cold, intriguing and sometimes nostalgic ones. By not recognizing the faces, the spectators reappropriate them, reinventing their life stories with the fuzzy feeling of having known them forever.

JFMC

It is sometimes quite delicate to understand these photographs’ contexts : the place, the lighting, the time of the day or the subject remain uncertain. It doesn’t matter much. The deeper we head into the exhibition, the more immersed we get in Bruno Nuytten’s recreated world, to finally get where he wants to lead us.

Through the very assertive editing of his photos, Bruno Nuytten not only captures the scene he witnesses, but above all reveals and brings out all of their expressive potential.

Bruno Nuytten’s website here.