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| Best of Photographers |
Alain BOUEZ
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When I was six years old, in 1975, by chance I found my first fossil during a family walk. The curiosity about this discovery made me find out about the paleontological world and also the mineralogical world. My interest for minerals has never left me since then, whereas my attraction for fossils has slowly dimmed. In my youth, this passion wasn’t thorough but rather lived in an amateurish way, a pretext to go to such-or-such a day out search on the terrain.
At the same time, my parents gave me my first camera for my twelfth birthday. I used to take it everywhere to photograph landscapes, a theme that I still appreciate nowadays as much as before. When I was 18, I felt like trying to take photographs of minerals. It was a way to set them off. So I purchased my first reflex camera and a bellow in order to enable me to highlight the millimetric samples that I found, the only ones which were perfect... Thus, I began from the start with macro-photos, my favourite field.
In 1994, when my engineer studies were finished in Grenoble, in the heart of the Alps, I decided to devote myself more seriously to the mineralogical world. I was then a faithful frequent visitor to mineral exhibitions, I joined a mineralogical club, and I took up again mineral photography that I have given up during part of my studies.
At present, I take barely more than 100 mineral photographs per year during my free time, mainly intended for the French review " Le Règne Minéral ". I work with no flash : I use reflectors, diffusers, masks and up to five light sources simultaneously. When I take a mineral photograph, I do my best to facilitate the " legibility " of the sample by highlighting crystalline shape, relief, matter and transparency. But the result has to constitute a " scene " where the general aestheticism mustn’t be sacrificed. When it’s possible, I attempt to achieve the most exhaustive representation of the crystal, but also a simple graphics which can be perceived without any reference to the mineral nature of the sample.
Nowadays I especially collect alpine minerals and French minerals, without being indifferent to other types of minerals. My main criteria are quality and aestheticism, not necessarily rarity or size. For instance, I would surely have far more interest in an unusual crystallization of an ordinary sort than for a mineralogical rarity visually unattractive, even a French one... |
Alain BOUEZ
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| Last update 12.14.2003 |
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