Antoine Schneck – Headhunter

“I’m not trying to tell a story. I try to give access to the face,” says artist-photographer Antoine Schneck, whose work has been exhibited for some twenty years on picture rails all over the world (New York, Shanghai…). “My father was a maxillo-facial surgeon, and he sometimes gave me the opportunity to attend some of his operations. The memory of his gestures repairing the faces of damaged people, of broken faces… remains engraved in my mind”, confided the brother of novelist Colombe Schneck to the weekly Le Point.

“Being a photographer allows you to get very close to people, which is a delicate thing in everyday life,” continues this graduate of the École Louis-Lumière, who fell into the photography hobby at the age of twelve.

For a time, he worked as a cameraman on television (La Cinq, etc.) and as a photographer for architecture and interior design magazines, before taking his lenses to Africa (Burkina Faso, Mali, Sudan, Ethiopia).

In his luggage is a portable shooting studio, a large Quechua-type tent with four translucent sides, in which he takes portraits of local villagers.
A totally neutral setting, protected from the stresses and strains of the environment. Where, armed with his camera, Antoine immortalizes their looks with surgical precision. And once the shoot is over, the work isn’t over! “In post-production, I use a palette to rework eye reflections, to eliminate from the final touch any visible trace betraying the photographer’s presence on location, or the equipment he uses.” There are even a few trade secrets: “They are directly inspired by tricks that painters have been using since the 12th century, which I gleaned from various paintings in the Louvre Museum.” The sensibility of this photographic approach is not so far removed from painting, in both its procedures and its ends. A subtle work that sublimates the capture of human unveiling, a magical encounter, in the moment, unique. ■