Interview with Bernard Drouillet

Born in Paris in 1954, Bernard Drouillet divided his life between music and photography from the 80s after a school marked by the Latin Quarter, at the Henri Quatre high school and at the Sorbonne. In parallel to a career as a jazz drummer, which led him to play and record with various French and American musicians, he studied photography at a photo club and then at the Centre de Formation et de Documentation (CFD) in Paris to become a photojournalist. Freelance photojournalist from 1992 to 1998, he will distribute his work in colour through the agencies Sipa and Editing until 2006, with various press magazine publications such as Nouvel Observateur, Actuel, l’Express, VSD, La Vie and others. In 1997, he exhibited his personal work in black and white for the first time at a collective exhibition at the UPC (Union des Photographes Créateurs). Leaving the press and its constraints aside, he will invest himself in this personal approach by simultaneously answering orders for the CNP, the Centre Chopin, the ADAC in Paris, La Réunion des Musées Nationaux, the gallery La Maison-près-Bastille or the town hall of Sceaux.

Bernard Drouillet has exhibited in Paris, at the Actis gallery, at the L’œil du Huit gallery, at the Photo 2008 exhibition for Ilford and at the Heritage Days of the city of Sceaux, at the Espace New Angle, at the La Maison-près-Bastille gallery, at the social centrecultural Cerise in Paris and the city of Sceaux for the Month of Photography as well as at the gallery Art’buste in Richelieu (France). He received the Honourable Mention in Portraits at the 2024 Monovisions Awards. He has been a member of SAIF (Society of Still Image Authors) since 1999.

– How and when did you become interested in photography?

My first photographic emotions go back to the events of May 68 in Paris.
I was 14 years old and I wasn’t allowed to go out when it was hot in the street, my family lived in the heart of the Latin Quarter, epicenter of the fight; but in the quieter moments I went to school and I used to take some pictures, with my little plastic box, barricades, groups of students or damaged car including ours. My idea was to, modestly, keep track of all this.

– Is there any artist/photographer who inspired your art?

There is a before and after the emergence of some creators who upset their field as J S. Bach, Miles Davis, Kandinsky, Paul Mac Cartney and for photography Henri Cartier Bresson (list not exhaustive of course).
HCB was and still is for me the biggest photographic slap. But many other photographers amaze me like Fan Ho, Rodtchenko, Robert Franck, Sergio Larrain…but HCB is the foodland.

– Why do you work in black and white rather than colour?

I take black and white photos because it forces me to go to the essential. Colour for me is painting where it is an extremely rich and boundless language as in Pierre Bonnard who is my favorite painter. In colour photography, apart from Saul Leiter, I often see only shimmering observations and assume to make enemies.

– How much preparation do you put into taking a photograph/series of photographs?

A priori I do not prepare anything because what leads my work is the principle of Coincidence, for which I made a book a few years ago and that consists of going fishing and when it’s good to put in relation different planes of a situation to give it meaning. For me, the essence of photography is the capture of reality without being its reproduction. That said, I had to prepare a lot when working for the magazine press and even for the series of portraits entitled Flottements that you had noticed.
I photographed in argentic for 40 years, with DSLR cameras Pentax and Nikon then Leica M 6 and 7 and medium format Hasselblad. The digital transition, which I use now, was very painful for me; I hated the cameras, screens and all this useless electronics.

– Where is your photography going? What projects would you like to accomplish?

My work will probably end up in the trash after my death, except for people who have pictures of me at home, but until then I try to produce 1 or 2 books and some exhibitions.

Website: https://b-drouillet.com