Henry Roy
06/10/2008 (7:55 am)
Henry Roy is a Paris based photographer. He was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in 1963, where his father was a prominent member of the Haitian army which opposed François Duvalier. He emigrated to France with his family at age three. Henry has photographed Charlotte Rampling, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Ludivine Sagnier, and Irina Lazareanu, among others.
See below for interview with Interview with Purplemagazine
How did you get interested in photography?
When I witnessed, for the first time, the slow emergence of a photograph beneath the safelights of a darkroom, I experienced a genuine shock. It was at a friend’s house, I was 18 and I thought it was simply magic, as if the end result was meant to reveal me to myself. Since then, I haven’t ceased trying to learn how to master the strange alchemy that is photography. I started by photographing the people around me. Since I never had any money, I had to steal the materials I needed for printing black-and-white photos.
How has your practice evolved over the course of time?
I was professionally trained as a photographer. My professor was an erudite iconoclast. Rather than teaching us technique, he preferred to theorize on subjects as diverse as art, sports, or psychoanalysis. His courses taught me more about literature and cinema than the medium of photography. I then earned my living as a reporter, “covering” various demonstrations (especially political ones). I worked with a 135mm semi-manual. I had to be very fast and accurate. It was boring, but formative. Later, I embarked on a book project of black-and-white portraits bringing together various black personalities in France around the theme of identity. For me, this project served as a framework for questioning my own black identity in this country. I photographed in the studio, in medium-sized format, in a rigorous, academic style. It was an excellent apprenticeship in exploring the psychological subtleties of the portrait, but a disastrous experience on a personal level. My approach was interpreted as a justification for ethnic separatism. The book wasn’t at all successful, contrary to the exhibition that accompanied it.
Around this time, I received a phone call from my professor, who would help me over the following two years, through passionate nocturnal discussions soaked in whiskey, to liberate myself from his apprenticeship in order to invent my own language. I was aiming for the most extreme possible form of spontaneity and worked with a small amateur auto-focus. I wanted to release myself from technique in order to prioritize the senses. It was a period of exploration, extremely confused. In the process of unlearning, I had the feeling of never having known anything. I took photographs, without believing in it, of everything that passed by. That’s how I discovered the photography of the ’90s, such as the work of Wolfgang Tillmans, in which the merit of identity-based constructs resonated with my own aspirations.
Through my collaborations with different magazines, I understood to what extent my photos could express my personality. I had recourse to a 135mm automatic, a compromise between the rigor of the medium-sized format and the spontaneity of a small autofocus. My current work thus attains a synthesis of the principal stages of my experience. My images have now become the faithful expression of my exiled interiority, from which the mixed-race identity has been constructed around encounters (physical and intellectual) as diverse as they are contradictory. My sensibility veers towards fragility, the instability of beings and things, that I seize in a shudder, between two moments, two states, like selected extracts from an improbable fiction about my life.
What do you consider to be your greatest success?
I can admit that I am rather satisfied to have succeeded, at the expense of terrible doubts and extreme isolation, in creating my position in the world, in uniting the scattered bits of my fragmented self. While it can’t be said that art has served as my therapy, I can affirm, on the other hand, that it has been—and remains—a determining factor in the development of my individuality.
