Avec Le Coeur

A while back I did a post on French photographer Théo Gosselin and I've been following his work with a keen interest ever since. He recently came out with a book called Avec Le Coeur, which is a collection of all his best photographs.

I found this great blurb for Gosselin's book that I really think hits the nail on the head:

Originally from Le Havre in the Haute-Normandie region of northern France, photographer and filmmaker Théo Gosselin currently divides his time between Paris and Amiens. 

Whilst clearly indebted to the photography of Ryan McGinley, Nan Goldin and Larry Clark, unlike the self-confessed "pseudo-fiction" of McGinley's work, the subjects in Théo Gosselin's images are friends rather than models, and the situations are not mythic constructions but glimpses of an underground lifestyle in a post-9/11 and post-AIDS world in which social media has blurred the boundaries between public and private, and between being documented and simply being. 

At times, Gosselin´s work approaches something akin to poésie bucolique; his photographs representing modern day pastoral landscapes that resemble 21st century equivalents of Poussin's Et in Arcadia ego, Manet's Déjeuner sur L'herbe or Cézanne's Les Grandes Baigneuses. At other times, his images capture moments more resonant of Bacchanalian scenes painted by Titian, Rubens or Levêque.

Deliberately cinematic, Gosselin's photography reveals friends in the act of escaping from their regular lives into newly enticing and perilous modes of existence, ever in search of the persistent though elusive idea of freedom. 

I would kill to get my hands on one of the 460 limited first edition copies but until then I'll settle for the magic of the interwebs. 

You can too by checking out Gosselin's work on his blog or on Facebook.