BE BOLD, BE YOU: An Interview With Franck Onouviet
NYFA: Your creative output also includes rather striking portrait photographs. What is your philosophical and technical approaches to photography and how does it differ from your documentary film work?
FO: Is it the part where the myth goes away…? Okay so I’m not sure which [aspect of my] photography we are talking about. So depending on it I would say this, some of it is solely me, and others are a collaboration with a friend and photographer Cheick Touré.
Photography is like a blink, I don’t really like a long set up, unless I have a very strong concept and usually I share it with my friend (Cheick T) but it’s like taking as little as much time to snap it, searching for the right amount of time needed to capture what my eyes caught in a glimpse, and sometimes I can’t even snap anything, here comes the weird part. It’s like out of the whole eye line and vision I see or envision something interesting, but I have to move around the light to catch something I think my eyes saw. The only difference I see is that it takes less time so I take advantage of it. I don’t really like to spend hours behind a computer…it takes me away from the outside. And shooting a doc keeps me out there for longer but out there…ahaha.