Marilyn Monroe Niagara by Francois Fontaine

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These photographs come from the Silenzio! Mémoires de cinéma series, through which François Fontaine pays vibrant homage to the 7th Art. Freeze frames, taken from memorable films throughout the history of cinema, such as Alfred Hitchcock’s To Catch A Thief or Jean-Pierre Melville’s The Samurai, engender visual emotions led by “a reflection on memory, dream and fantasy”. Bringing a chromatic “shift” to the scenes, the photographer creates pictorial and dreamlike images that “attract and hypnotise through their sensual, nostalgic and universal language”. Recognisable by their silhouettes, the portraits of famous actors and actresses such as Grace Kelly, Alain Delon, Jean Seberg and Marilyn Monroe are transformed into iconic images that refer to the whole of the cinema: “Genres, stories and eras interpenetrate and merge in these images, that echo one another.” FF.

François Fontaine was born in 1968. He lives and works in Paris. As a history of art student at the Sorbonne, he developed a passion for photography. As the son of a naval officer this practice was closely linked to travel. Thereby he went to South-East Asia, Spain, Brazil, China, Japan and India. Each of these destinations was an opportunity to continue his artistic research from an iconographic point of view as well as stylistic. These series were awarded and François Fontaine was a finalist in the Prix Kodak de la Critique Photographique in 1997, the Prix CCF in 2005 and the Leica Oscar Barnack Prize in 2006.