ENTRY DESCRIPTION
Gravity shapes and give strength to the human body. Since my early years as a climber and now as an amateur photographer, I wanted to show the genuine (non sexualized) beauty of the human body grappling with the constraint of verticality and the (almost living) organic shapes of sandstone. Whereas sport photography is often about showing performance, sometime nude fine art photography easily fall down on the cliché of charm. I choose models who had no previous experience in rock climbing. They had to deal with the very few moving possibilities offered by the climbing holds, whose three-dimensional disposition is similar to a syntactical framework where you have to find the path to the least effort. Composing with their body limits, lack of strength and even sometime lack of balance, they progressively forget about the mental conditioning of posing nude and discovered a personal way to dance with the rock. All pictures were taken in famous places that have been climbed by generations of climbers and that are renowned for years, all in the forest of Fontainebleau (France), one of the few places in Europe where rock climbing started to be a sport at the end of the 19th Century. I light-shaped the sandstone with studio strobes, trying to make it alive. And as in a dream, the pictures came.

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