Finding the Extraordinary in the Ordinary…
Street scenes are Jean-Pierre Daunis’s main source of inspiration, which he photographs in an instinctive way.
He allows himself to be guided by his sensitivity in an attempt to render everyday life more aesthetic. He seeks to find the extraordinary within the ordinary.
This series is an invitation to travel between the real and the abstract, between photography and painting.
About Jean-Pierre Daunis
Jean-Pierre Daunis began photographing at around the age of 18 as a self-taught photographer, using his father’s OM-10 camera. As an adult, he later attended introductory workshops in photography (shooting and darkroom work), and what began as an interest became a true passion.
He has always kept himself informed about developments and innovations through specialized photography magazines and has consistently invested in the best equipment he could afford—first film SLR cameras and later advanced digital models—so long as their prices remained reasonable.
For the past ten years, he has worked primarily with a full-frame digital rangefinder camera, through which he learned to compose without seeing the final image in advance. What he finds most captivating is discovering the photographs later on his computer and experiencing the unpredictable emotion that some images can evoke, much like in the days of film and negatives.
Street photographers such as Saul Leiter, Ernst Haas, Harry Gruyaert, Joel Meyerowitz, Fred Herzog, Alex Webb, and Gustavo Minas, as well as black-and-white photographers including Marc Riboud, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Sebastião Salgado, among others, have been major sources of motivation and inspiration for him.
To define his style, Daunis describes it as a purely aesthetic approach, deeply informed by pictorial references. He enjoys working with color, urban elements, and reflections—through juxtapositions or superimpositions—and sometimes creating alternative readings of a scene, always without manipulation or cropping.
He lives in Toulouse, which he explores almost every week with his camera, and regularly exhibits his work in galleries throughout the city. In addition, his photographs have been published several times in the Readers’ Portfolio of L’Œil de la Photographie, of which he is a member. He is also part of the Street Photography France collective. [Official Website]
