Romain Bagnard: Medusa

Athens is the setting and Greek mythology is the reference for ‘Medusa’ series to unfold. Street life of the city works as a metaphor for the life that is full of a bunch of raving feelings and experiences. Here and there are the signs of fight and rage, density of nature and perplexity of human expression. And at the same time there is also certain fearlessness in the unflinching gaze at all this. The desire to look and see things and people as directly and as closely as possible. Even though there’s always a risk that one who gazed into Medusa’s eyes would turn to stone.

About the project
It is in Athens that this series came into being with the story of Athena's brutal birth. Echoes of it could be traced in every single street I crossed, in my photographic approach but also in my personal journey. It is a belligerent urgency of life, of challenging and of self- assertion.
In this polysemic corpus, with the street as the main common denominator, colours and material clash as well as lines and faces, signifed and signifying within a dynamic and personal mental mapping. Tere is a need to see, to keep traces, without making a narrative, nor really a testimony, rather a form of impressions, symbols, stigmata left by time on man and matter. I see my work as a constant back and forth between diferent levels of interpretation: metaphorical, ironic, iconic, aesthetic or metaphysical.
I grasp these fragments of reality and recompose them in a new set which, as in the myth of Medusa, forms my mirror of truth. A mirror which everyone is free to let himself be reflected into.

About the photographer
Romain Bagnard resides in Lyon (France) and has been practicing photography for twenty years in a self-taught way. He's been selected by GUP magazine to be part of Fresh Eyes 2020 talents that bring together 100 emerging European photographers in a book. His series Te Shelter was exhibited at the Athens Photo Festival 2020 and will be at Photographiques du Mans during spring 2021. His series Medusa has been recently shortlisted for the Gomma Grant 2021.

Website
www.romainbagnard.com

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