La Croisière Rouge, 2021

Gabriel Baxas   New & remarkable Artists

Gabriel Baxas is the director of photography for cinema and television. His work is part of a practice where technical and artistic demands are put to the service of a narrative and a visual creation that serves a story. In each film project, it is a long collaborative process with the director where it is established and where his eye as a photographer occupies a central place. He conceives light, framing, and composition as elements that participate in the construction of a visual identity specific to each film.

Cinema, however, obeys a language and certain visual currents, sometimes repetitive or conventional, often very close physically to the subjects and characters. His photographic practice of the still image thus allows him to take a distance, to extract himself from these automatisms and to rediscover a more personal approach, at once freer and more distant in the gaze directed at the subjects. It is the idea of a posture and a movement of stepping back from the world around us, opening up a space for observation, reflection, and interpretation that is more sensitive and intimate, which obeys no kind of urgency or constraint.

At the heart of his photographic approach is the intention to extract the idea of poetry from his sole literary frame to inscribe it in a broader perception of reality. Seeking to highlight with humor, tenderness, or melancholy, the detail to which, without distance, we would not have paid attention.