Showcase and Exclusive Interview with a Top Artist: Christophe Kiciak

A: Hello Giulia! First of all, I would like to thank you for this opportunity to show my work at pxleyes.com, it is much appreciated. I am a 33 years old man, living in France, a bit to the west of Paris. I am married, and my wife and I live in a small town lost between a forest and a river, far from urban activities. While we both work in big cities, we like to stay at calm when the evening comes. I work in the IT security field, performing penetration tests for big companies. While this has nothing to do with photography, creativity is often required to hack into applications and systems: I suppose this kind of “out-of-the-box” thinking shows a bit in my images.

A: I have always been very inspired by performances that require much work. I have much respect for anyone spending lots of time on something, just for the sake of the “Perfection Quest”. This is something that really guides my life and personal choices: I have great difficulties to not do something passionately. Or I just don’t do it at all. Photography was no exception to that. I started it in June 2009. Before that date, I had no camera, zero processing skills, no knowledge in general about creating picture in any way. At that point of my life, I was searching for a new hobby: I was feeling that something was lacking. Photography came to my mind, mostly because it seemed to be a good way to satisfy my thirst of technical perfection, while also creating hopefully good looking images. I started to look at several tutorials on the Internet, learned about theory basics, and ordered a camera. Quickly, I knew that I wanted my pictures to be a medium for messages, for thoughts. While I do like great and beautiful landscapes, there is not much I would ever been able to add to them: I don’t have the talent nor the interest for that. I still shot some of those from time to time, but what really attracts me are unusual scenes, strangeness, surrealism. I believe one can embed more personal thoughts and meaning in such work. Consequently, I am often deliberately ignoring realism and just let ideas go freely.

A: I spend more time thinking about my pictures than actually creating them. Finding ideas is often a long and painful process: some of my pictures depict thoughts that I’m wandering with since childhood. Some were found in a few days of brainstorming, but almost never less than that. Therefore, I would say the most important tool is the will to think about a precise concept for hours, until it is adequately translated to something that can be shown with a picture. From there, I can’t deny the fact that many of my images wouldn’t exist without Photoshop, which is of course a fantastic piece of software.

A: I suppose I am relatively quick at learning technical stuff. Understanding how all the different photography settings work together, how to fine tune a lighting setup, or how to handle software is not particularly hard to me. However, composing an image, finding which colours to use, what to put the focus on, in a word, the artistic part, is something I work very hard on. I do spend a lot of time looking at others’ work, trying to analyze why it is a good picture, and how it was conceived. It can be photos, but also paintings, sculpture, movies, music, etc. From there, I build in my head a list of good recipes, that I use and mix to create my own stuff.

A: I try hard to not get under strong influences, in order to be as original as possible. That being said, I like a lot Storm Thorgerson for example: his very famous album covers are often crazy creative, and he even has the luxury of achieving them mostly without Photoshop tricks. That’s really an approach I like, because the pictures just look better (unless you are extremely good at CGI). Unfortunately, building extremely elaborated setups come at a great financial cost that I can’t afford, so Photoshopping items together is often the only viable solution. As for a muse, we often discuss my ideas and composition with my wife. She is not much into the technical part, but her opinion and feelings do guide me a lot to the final result.

A: Don’t listen to anyone’s advice, and just do what you like. But if you want a result, do it like no one else would, and don’t count your time. For my first significant photo (published on 1X, featured in their 2010 book, called “Boom boom” and depicting a collision of milk droplets in a coffee cup under stroboscopic light) I spent about 4 full week-ends trying and trying stuff endlessly, until I was satisfied with the result. Everyone was telling me that droplets was an overdone topic, but still I wanted to give it a try. Although it is not the best photo in the world, I am somewhat proud of how it turned, and even more since I was the only one to believe in a satisfactory outcome. If you don’t believe in what you can accomplish, no one will for you!