Daniel Boudinet. Time of colour

Exhibition Catalogue Daniel Boudinet. Time of colour, presented at the Château de Tours (16 june - 28 oct. 2018).

Daniel Boudinet died in 1990, aged only 45. During his too-brief career this young, passionately experimental photographer exhibited in France’s foremost galleries and art institutions, found a place in prestigious private collections, and was praised by such leading intellectuals as Roland Barthes and art critic Bernard Lamarche-Vadel. A year after his death, his œuvre and private collection were donated to the French state by his family; yet since then he has been unjustly forgotten.

Although the bulk of his work was in black and white, colour was the field in which, throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Boudinet emerged as a true innovator. Models of restraint, his nocturnal series assert the primacy of aesthetic choices over the medium’s technical potential. These choices were all the more remarkable because at the time black and white dominated both the press – for economic reasons – and the output of artists who remained true to a tradition based on geometric forms, nuances of grey and a play on contrast.

This fresh look at the life and times of an artist who, like his contemporaries John Batho and Luigi Ghirri, explored a palette quite different from that of the great American colourists, provides an opportunity to reflect on the role and history of colour in photography, especially in Europe.