Christian Chaize, a self-taught French artist, lives and works in Lyon, France. In 1992, he was awarded the Prix European Panorama de Kodak for Young European Photographer in Arles, France. For the past 20 years, he has had a successful career as a commercial photographer. Recently, however, Chaize became obsessed with a small stretch of coastline in southern Portugal while vacationing there in 2004. It gave new life to his on-going personal work, which began to take precedence over his professional ambitions. His commitment to this series has, thus far, garnered Chaize a one-person gallery exhibition in Lyon, and two museum exhibitions in Portugal (Sines and Lisbon). Of this work he says, ‘From a distance, I observe the variables: light, weather, time of day, the ebb and flow of the ocean, and the sunbathers, unaware, below my large format camera. The images are shot vertically, a departure from the traditional, horizontal format in landscape photography. It puts my subject matter in the form of a portrait – an ongoing record of this ethereal yet playful nook in nature over the minutes, the days, the years. Ultimately, I try to instill an element of time within these captured moments… visceral time, elastic from one image to another’. Christian’s work is available for purchase on 20×200.
Via Beautiful/Decay
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