When photography took off at the end of the 19th century, painters found themselves without a means of subsistance. Portraits, which used to be the privilege of rich families, became accessible to the bourgeoisie, and painters had to reinvent their art in order to survive.
This turn of events gave birth to a radical evolution in painting with the advent of pictorial movements like Impressionism, Pointillism or Fauvism. With Cubism, painters even draw their inspiration from cutting edge science of their time to rethink the theories of representation, and developed new ways to visualize 3-dimensional objects on a 2-dimensional canvas. These evolutions culminated, with Orphism, in new theories of colors and new ways to use them.
Today, photography is about to suffer a shake-up of the same magnitude. Smartphones are everywhere, and figurative photographs are quickly losing both their visual appeal and business value, forcing photographers to rethink their art entirely. While a significant part of the community is returning to the roots with a renewed interest in the many techniques that were developed at the end of the 19th century to produce images from light, another part of the community is considering the digital aspect of modern photography and videography as a core element of their art, with no obligation to emulate silver prints whatsoever.
Quantum Photography® and Quantum Video find their roots in the second trend. Instead of considering the artefacts resulting from the pixelation of images as a necessary evil that must be hidden at all costs by a never-ending increase in the resolution of camera sensors, Quantum Photography proposes to take advantage of phenomena of quantum essence (interferences in particular) so that these “defects” serve as a basis for the development of an entirely new type of creative process.
The starting point of Quantum Photography® is always a digital photo or video. This approach differs from that of digital artists who synthesize images from scratch using Artificial Intelligence. In a sense, Quantum Photography serves as a missing link between traditional photography and more abstract or conceptual visual arts.
Quantum Photography produces a new breed of hybrid images, both figurative and abstract, evolving freely between photography and painting. This duality is reminiscent of the wave (smooth) and particle (granular) models of matter in quantum mechanics.
From a visual standpoint, quantum photographs simultaneously show two complementary aspects of our world: the “granular texture” of the microscopic world at the atomic scale and the “smoothness” of the world at our own scale.
The series "The Sad Clown" (pictured below) is the very first work to emerge from this research.
