Jean-Claude Bélégou, France

Type of Photographs :

Portraits, "vision-like" pictures, experimental.

Useful Links : 

www.belegou.org

Rough Information and Comments :

Jean-Claude Bélégou is a "theory guy". He's been into photography since almost 40 years now, and his work involves a huge number of pictures, organized in series tracking his successive investiguations and experimentations on photography.

Premiers Visages - 1989

Alone or inside a group of artists (like "Noir Limite" 1986-1993), he focused mainly on the following concepts : the human body and the notion of limit or border (between the fabric and the flesh, between the hair and the skin, between sleep and consciouness, between inside or outside, life and death, between real and unreal).

Being an adept of the photography as an intelectuallized and organized art (versus spontaneity), his "world" often has an "unreal" or "dream-like" feeling to it. Indeed, it mimicks daily situation, but in a very artificial and scenarised way.

Women being an obvious magnet for him and his art : it's obvious that he has a particular tenderness for young thin women with long brown hair :)

Les Vierges - 1988

Even if his website is a bit "dense" and disorienting, it's worth having a look at his different periods, especially "Premiers Visages", "Empreintes", "Les Vierges" or his most recent colour series. The website displays diptycs in an original manner : the image flickers into another as you pass the mouse on it.

After a huge exploration of black and white technique, he recently switched to color photographs:

Both above and below : Les Beaux Jours - 2005-2008

Among his latter works, the serie called "Les Choses" is showing another facet of his work, away from the body, and yet not so far : even absent the body is evoked, by the juxtaposition of 2 pictures.

This is typical, since his bodies of work are mostly sub-divided into diptycs, triptycs... like the two above.

I'm not going to mention the numerous selfportraits, since every artist has to deal with his own image, and his aging too, but it's clearly not my favourite part.

Andreas Bitesnich, Austria

Type of Photographs : 

Mainly nudes, but also portraits and travel pictures.

Useful Links :

www.bitesnich.com (official website)

Interesting interview

Rough Information and Comments :

I discovered Andreas Bitesnich in an exhibition in Vienna called "More Nudes".

As I was walking through the exhibition, I had a strange feeling about the pictures, but couldnt tell what it was. 

It took me 30 minutes to figure out : On about 60 pictures, you could see only once the eyes of the model opened. Either the eyes were out of the pictures (see above), or closed, or hidden. This artistic choice left me with a cold impression of body used as clay to sculpt a shape.

Indeed, Andreas chooses most of his nudes models for their physical capacities and puts them in acrobatic postures (as you can see on the interview above in usefull links). He also claims to be seeking "balance" within his frames. Obviously such a trick avoids to slip into erotism and sentimentality, an easy slope while doing nudes.

The 'acrobatic' shots are clearly not the ones I prefer from him.

I prefer, the impressive serenity flowing out of this portrait :

Or the fun symmetry of that one : 

But above all, my favorites are his portraits rather than nudes, that can be found in the "portraits" tab of his website, or while browsing his book called "Travel".