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Matinee: 'Meet Alexandre Guirkinger'
12 November 2022
Saturday matinees long ago let us escape from the ordinary world to the island of the Swiss Family Robinson or the mutinous decks of the Bounty. Why not, we thought, escape the usual fare here with Saturday matinees of our favorite photography films?
So we're pleased to present the 474th in our series of Saturday matinees today: Meet Alexandre Guirkinger.
In this 3:16 video by Aquarium Productions commissioned by by Monocle Media, we visit with French photographer Alexandre Guirkinger at his studio near Paris.
Guirkinger prefers large format film photography and here revisits two mountain shoots, one taken with a 4x5 and the other with an 8x10 camera.
In 2019 Monocle asked him to shoot in the village of Chamonix near Mont Blanc. He was particularly drawn to the mountain guides, he says. Their faces, having endured the harsh elements, seemed to him to be landscapes themselves.
The video shows us a few of those portraits as Guirkinger talks about his adventure. You can see more of the project online.
That adventure took him to Vallee Blanche, the ski resort in the Chamonix Valley. There he used a large format camera to capture "a sense of detail and space that is quite amazing."
It was a deliberate process to frame these shots, he says, projecting himself into each scene he composed in the ground glass.
Guirkinger was born in 1980 in Villeneuve-Saint-Georges, France. He graduated from Institut d'EĢtudes Politiques in Lille and worked briefly at Magnum Photos as a production manager before focusing on photography fulltime in 2006. He now lives and works in Paris where he is represented by the Rose agency.