Description

Stéphane Arnaud – Stéphane Arnaud
Publisher: Setanta, 2026
Softcover, 48 pages, English
Size: 21x16cm
Edition: 350 copies
New in seal

027 – Stéphane Arnaud is the twenty-seventh in an ongoing Bi-Monthly series publishing the work of emerging photographers.

I rarely plan a photograph. They come to me the way light comes into a room, quietly, often when I’m thinking about something else. What I do isn’t really hunting. It’s closer to staying available: letting things arrange themselves and being ready when it happens.

I’m convinced there is nothing that doesn’t deserve to be photographed. Anything can become a picture, and so photography appears to me as a permanent quest, an attention that never quite switches off. The subject was never the point. What I’m after is a certain silence inside the frame, a moment that holds still long enough to mean something.

I work in black and white and in color, sometimes sharp, sometimes grainy, occasionally blurred. I’ve stopped apologizing for the imperfections. A little grain, a slight movement, these are not mistakes to me. They’re the texture of having been there, of a hand that was present rather than a machine that was precise.

What I look for is a subjective photograph rather than a merely factual or figurative one. An image where the gaze precedes the intention, where looking comes before deciding. Bored with obvious reality, I’m fascinated by its transformation into a subjective vision. I want to reach the point where, through pure concentration of seeing, the composed picture becomes more made than taken. Less descriptive, more creative; less informative, more suggestive; less prose, more poetry.

I photograph because it’s how I pay attention to the world, and because now and then a fragment of the everyday turns, almost on its own, into something I want to keep.