"I don't change my subjects; it is the subjects that change."
Éric Antoine
French photographer Éric Antoine has devoted much of his practice to historical photographic processes, in particular wet-plate collodion. Living a quiet life in the French countryside, he deliberately focuses his photography on his immediate, familiar surroundings, returning to the same places again and again. Throughout his work, a concern with the passage of time and an artistic and existential quest for simplicity remain constant.
Using wet-plate collodion, Antoine creates ambrotypes on glass, carrying out every stage of the demanding and unpredictable process himself. The resulting photographic objects have finely detailed, shimmering surfaces. In an age of instant image production, his slow and deliberate approach becomes a distinctly contemporary choice - a counterpoint to what he calls the "digital deluge".
Antoine observes how familiar places transform over time and across the seasons, bearing witness to their evolution and the passage of time. This sustained attention is visible in Oliviers, where he focuses on the gnarled trunks, branching structures and weathered surfaces of olive trees, their forms bearing visible traces of time. He also works with still lifes and recurring symbolic forms. In Cerveaux, layers of papers and stacked documents, some drawn from his own family history, form sculptural arrangements that evoke real or imagined lives. A dark sphere recurs throughout Antoine's work, appearing here between the stacked papers. In Useful Lies, however, the sphere becomes large and luminous, taking on a more hopeful meaning: a symbol of optimism maintained in the face of hardship.
Across these series, Antoine's recurring forms and slow photographic process reflect a practice rooted in materiality, time and close observation.