François Halard

As Luigi Ghirri has stated, photography is an act of cancelling the external world. It is an act of excluding the rest in order to show a particular part, in a process of re-invention rather than testimony. Like memory, photography is not a matter of resurrecting that which has been, but is an act of reconstruction and investigation.
François Halard's photographic story, compiled in Italy through several journeys and over the course of some years, is an intimate and personal investigation, as well as a reminiscence, of a spatial code charged with sense of belonging and social memory that has held the traits of Italy's collective identity, and cultural – prior to political – unity, for centuries. It is a shared language of construction and interpretation of the landscape as an exercise in voluntary geography that the Twentieth century has progressively betrayed.
In an uninterrupted dialogue with this contemporaneity and inspired by the ideals of Goethe's writings and the accounts of lengthy stays in the “Fair Country” by intellectuals of the past, the Grand Tour exhibit selects classical antiquities, piled up in the warehouses of Cinecittà in precarious equilibrium between reality and make-believe. It enters Roman and Sicilian villas, like Villa Medici and Villa Palagonia, and Palladian villas, and creates a narrative by images of places ancient and familiar, in a collective sense, which acquires the oneiric contours of a vision. As in a ritual, built on the repetitiveness of gestures and an accurate selection of the places and objects required to celebrate it, Halard's camera lens confers sacredness to the spaces it focuses on through the course of his journey. Repetitiveness is not immediate, since there is continuity of perspective, a point of equilibrium between inwardness and what lies outside. It is a way of relating to the world, a world in which beauty is both a necessity and a value, which finds its ultimate expression in an – almost anthropological – investigation of ways of living, when the Grand Tour visits the homes and the studios of artists who have continued to work in the spirit of, and respect for, that spatial code. At Casa Malaparte, in Capri, chosen by Godard for his film Contempt, Halard captures the perfect harmony between architecture, sea and wind, in a view that, elsewhere through his journey, is reinterpreted with an awareness that today's Italian landscape only allows a glimpse of the harmony between nature and culture. The images of Carlo Mollino's apartment in Turin, like an artist's portrait, photograph the corporeality and atmospheres of a poetic work. Cy Twombly's studio in Gaeta is a demonstration of what photography is capable of, producing a radiography of a universe in which the relationships between objects are a perfect synthesis between sophisticated beauty and everyday life. With Luigi Ghirri's studio, Halard's journey closes symbolically as well as chronologically in Roncocesi, which becomes, perhaps more than any other, the place where Italian photography rediscovers the threads of the spatial code of which the Grand Tour, in an ongoing experimentation, is pure and personal reminiscence.

 

François Halard was born in Arles (France) and studied at the National School of Decorative Arts in Paris. He then moved to New York, where he worked on ongoing projects for Vogue America, Vanity Fair, GQ and House & Garden. His work for these magazines made him one of the most sought-after and renowned architecture photographers of our age, laying the foundations for his long-term cooperation with Fabien Baron and Alex Lieberman. His refined style and exquisite technique have brought him clients of the likes of Giorgio Armani, Burberry, Ralph Lauren and Yves Saint-Laurent. One of François Halard's distinguishing traits is his fascination with the creative world of artists; he has photographed the studios of Jean-Charles Blais, Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg, Carlo Mollino, Julian Schnabel, Miquel Barcello, and Cézanne. During his career he has also held various public exhibitions, including in Arles, Paris and New York. He lives in New York and France.