Incubus’ Choice: Close-up on Dominique Massant

What message(s) do you want to express through your work?

In terms of message, I would say that every morning I am a new beginner photographer, and that I have an obsessive approach of instants of emotions, willing to play with desires and fantasies, working around seduction, fiction and reality which will blend around unclothed bodies, picked up and offered to the eyes.

Which artists inspire you? Who are your masters?

The photographers I admire the most are in particular JeanLoup Sieff for the atmosphere he creates and the unreal charm which permeates his work. I often like to revisit Ruth Bernhard’s photographs for the ephemeral side and the human warmth that inhabit her photographs. And finally, the softness of the pictures of Victor Skrebneski I discovered at the Photography West Gallery, in California.

What have you gained by being on the internet?

I particularly appreciate the idea of saving a trace, and for that I am very attached to the idea of storing and at the same time to show and exhibit my photographs, but my presence on the internet is mostly about communication.

Did the internet enable you to meet new models, to find new exhibit places?

I go back to the notion of communication tool of the internet, contacts are simplified, proposals and meetings more numerous, but nevertheless, I prefer the physical meeting approach to describe my projects and my strollings. The opportunity to meet the model enables me to reaffirm my attachment to the medium-format and to analog photography.
I have still not had an opportunity to exhibit through the internet though.

Has your work ever been censored? If so, how did you deal with it?

I have not met censorship up to now, but I do not forget this quote from Claude Debussy: “From the beginning of time, beauty has been felt by some like a secret insult.”

What projects mean a lot to you at the moment?

From the proposed choices at that time emerges a vague invasive feeling describing a close relation between reality and my imagination, between what we show and what we don’t. Those are subtle emotions of bare backs, instants of sensuousness at the border of the silky vastness of a woman’s back, some kind of ode to the everyday beauty.

Could you tell us a few words about the place you live/work in?

I would like, for that question only, to talk about the old house that accomodates the Atelier de l’Image, a strange studio a bit twisted set in Tourinnes-la-Grosse, a few paces from my home, in the Walloon Brabant, at the center of Belgium.
A studio that seems to have been built to take photographs and show them. With other photographers, we have been sharing this place for about thirty years, but this is another story.

Close-up on…