About

Maxime Bekerman started photography with a traditional camera and the curiosity of a teenager. By watching his mother working as an artistic frame maker, he earnt how to seek a beautiful image and how to highlight an object in his own unique way. She instilled in him an acute sense of detail and symmetry. He also became familiar with the delicate science of art embellishment. He entered Icart Photographie School in Paris, France thanks to a series shot during a safari in the Kruger national park, South Africa.

An admirer of Dali and Francis Bacon for their quirkiness and off-beat sense of humour, Maxime Bekerman chooses photography for its subversive property: « I got into photography because there is something magical about this invention. I like that the audience deliberately stick to the fraud, to be perturbed in their perception of reality. When you know how a camera works, you may lose a bit of its magic but I always try to bring it back by altering what the camera captures. »

Maxime Bekerman certainly has an obsession for the uniform. The one we wear but also the one we fear. The uniform is also what the society tries to thread us into every day until we turn into standard useable and used: « I examine the planned obsolescence issue and the way technology and corporations bring us to a do-nothingness to help them sell their products thatare more and more secure, disposable and disempowering. My practice is influenced by theories that defend relearning neglected savoir-faire. I am trying to immerse myself, step by step, in the lifestyle that involves being fully aware of our environment with the desire of dealing at best with this connexion to the world ».

In his series Identity, Trade body or Denatured, Maxime Bekerman gives the individual his body back, yet not his face. Mouths and eyes are not the ultimate ground of expression. On the other hand, the body is naked, painted, mineralized solemnly as for a sculpture. By giving up the movement, he calls out the spectator to find his place in the society and challenge him to go beyond his usual scope in his eventually uncomfortable comfort zone. The Rebel series which Maxime Bekerman is currently working on, seems to prove that nature surely can make it. It breaks metal, asphalt, symmetry to let its Diva come to the surface.