AW 25-26 Season Film : Première Vision X Quentin Lacombe The - Autumn-Winter 25-26
For the Autumn-Winter 25-26 season, Quentin LACOMBE lent his talent to Première Vision for a creation that celebrates Excellence and the Exceptional.
Quentin Lacombe is a Paris-based photographer and film director. He produces photos and films for luxury and fashion brands, the music industry, publishing houses and institutions. Since 2016, he has participated in several exhibitions showcasing his fine art photography.
For Première Vision, Quentin Lacombe explores the themes of AW 25-26 in a film presented in July at Première Vision Paris. We wanted to interview him to learn more about his creative processes.
After you have reworked and retouched them, your photos have quite painterly compositions. What role does color play in your photography?
When I began my career, I was drawn to documentary photography. Unlike reportage, documentary work allows for more creative freedom, a subjective perspective on a specific aspect of the world. Adjusting colors, whether during shooting or in post-production, adds to the sliding scale of subjectivity, as it alters the reality captured in each image. Over the years, I’ve really pushed the boundaries of subjectivity in my documentary photography, so the question becomes: how much of reality remains, and where does the fiction start?
Your work often showcases extreme contrasts, almost a signature – mixing light and shadow, sharpness and blur, structure and movement, the real and the unreal. How do you approach these opposing concepts?
Today we’re inundated by a constant flow and proliferation of images. For a long time, a photograph was actual proof of reality, but now, the sheer abundance of images is giving rise to a paradox. We’re more informed and connected to the world than ever, but the abundance of images overwhelms our critical thinking, our ability to take a step back and understand what we’re seeing. Reality blurs into fiction and vice versa. Today’s photographers are able to choose what they want to show and to which degree. A photographer can create new and unique interactions between previously disparate styles or kinds of images. The more we understand the universe, the bigger the challenges are for the medium tasked with communicating this understanding. So observational methods and image formatting really determine how we perceive the world.
You describe your solargraphic work as combining “a documentary practice and experimental research into the photographic medium.” And one of the more extreme concepts you explore is photography’s relationship with time. Can you tell us more about this?
My work is an effort to understand the universe as a fragmented, complex, and infinite experience. So, my research isn’t limited to the exclusive use of the camera as a means of observation, but also includes the use of primitive photography techniques and digital tools. All these means, when combined through digital collage or studio photography, involve challenging the immediacy of the photographic medium.
In my latest project, “Crucible of Time”, I use solargraphy as a way to question our relationship to images through the prism of time. A photograph can rip a hundred days out of time. This is the principle of the solargraph – a pinhole camera where the curve of the sun leaves its trail on photosensitive paper. Each day the light outlines the shadows, those of the trees and migrating insects, of buildings and weather events. Several different time periods are then layered together. Proof through images is elusive because they are alive – which I find endlessly fascinating. Amid the chaos of organic materials and the patterns of ultra-urbanization, the “Crucible of Time” photo series crystallizes this state on the verge of collapse.
Through its photographic processes, from long exposure to using only the negative of the image, I turn each print into a time capsule whose atmosphere illustrates the loss of control over our environment.