Shinjuku, les parapluies, 2017

Eric Benard  

For filmmakers, especially foreigners including Gaspard Noé in 2009 with Enter the Void and sometimes Japanese like the sulphurous Miike Takeshi, the nearby Kabuchicho district, saturated with neon hostess bars and cabarets, remains the essential place of all fantasies.

Edition dated, signed and numbered: 3/15
Photo 38x38 cm and 1 cm margin on each side
Hahnemühle Bright White Rag 310 g paper

TOKYO Series, SURFACES

Photos taken between 2011 and 2018, digitally. Square color format.
15 copies starting in the 40x40 cm format.

"Maybe I had come to find something that no longer exists."
Wim Wenders, Tokyo-ga

Moving and fluid, the capital of Japan inspires filmmakers, from Akira Kurosawa to Sofia Coppola, who directed the film Lost in Translation there. This set of twenty-four images entitled Tokyo, surfaces, is a montage of still images, photographs of lived moments, perhaps a new fiction played by very real actors. The city seen as a labyrinth of screens where windows, stairs, interchanges, footbridges… merge into a set of deceptive mirrors.


Photographer and freelance writer since 1989, after training in economics and Chinese, Éric Bénard takes a documentary and poetic look at the world, mainly in Europe and Asia. He is passionate about oriental cultures, especially that of Japan.

In addition to his missions for the press, corporate and publishing (Hachette, Gallimard, Géo Solar), he devotes himself to his personal work in the form of exhibitions, presented in Paris, Bordeaux, Dax, Rouen, Trouville-sur- Sea or Le Mans, and books.

Inspired by the world of writers, filmmakers and painters, it offers an evocation of the spirit of emblematic places: Indochina by Marguerite Duras, the city of Tokyo seen as a movie set, Mount Fuji and its sacred links with the Japanese, the Impressionists' Seine valley, Flaubert's Normandy with Voyage au pays d'Emma, ​​a photographic interpretation by Madame Bovary.

In addition, by privileging the portrait, in text and in image, it also questions the links that the man forges with his environment in several universes: The people of the river, The University at work or the people of flax.