Memo Ömür

We know photography for what it transcribes the capture of a moment. This medium, which is now within everyone's reach thanks to smartphones, satisfies the need to immortalize one's presence, a memory, an experience, a landscape ... Memo Ömür has been working for ten years as a photographer for the world information, cinema and advertising. At the same time, a very personal work, he photographs the street. Without thinking about it, he seeks life but not the intimate. A life that is expressed at every moment in a thousand instantly overlapping directions, but from which the photographer captures his own unique point of view. Despite a certain impression of automatism in his practice, he realizes that the subjects he photographs reflect distress. It then becomes clearer to him that this concrete urban space linked to the need for comfort and modernity is the very source of man's alienation. Without worrying about the framing, the blur, or the architecture, working at the opposite of his professional technique, the truth bursts out, like so many self-portraits, of feelings oscillating between anguish and hope. Like an interior mirror, the story of humanity can also be read in its daily life and its ordinary disorders. By photographing life without artifice, he reflects his own. The Man and Stone exhibition is held from September 14 to October 8, 2017 at the Graphem gallery. It brings together the personal color and black and white photographs that Memo Ömür took for more than ten years during his wanderings on three continents: a need for escape ultimately leading him to an inner flight.