DANIEL METZ

Sight is the sense that brings me the most pleasure. More than taste, hearing, or touch. Photography, even if it is a reduction of a real scene, can sometimes provide strong visual sensations.

My approach is to find in landscape photography the right balance between realism and the idealisation of reality. The search for an ideal photo is an endless quest. My best photograph is the one I would’ve loved to have taken.

In landscape photographs, I’m looking for purity of form as an aesthetic element, while also letting the colours take their own course.

In the Chinese series, even though the beauty of the landscapes is often enough to take beautiful photos, it was important to me to encourage the presence of local inhabitants, so as to include aspects of Chinese culture and civilisation.

For the photo Guilin Scenery, I had to enter a strictly prohibited military area that is off limits to the public in order to photograph the most beautiful sugar loaves in this region. I was stopped for questioning by the military police and held in custody for half a day. The colonel of the zone told me that in this case, the normal procedure was a thorough verification of my intentions, corresponding to a detention of a minimum of two years. However, by the end of the afternoon, having managed to convince him that my only motivations were artistic, I was authorised to take the bus to Guilin. The soldier had taken the memory card out of my camera to confiscate it. Fortunately, it was a high quality camera with two memory cards (one as a back-up).

It’s a photo that’s in my head and that might be taken one day…

I’m most proud of the fact that I returned to China to find a very poor, old fisherman who had been the subject of one of my photos and give him a share of the proceeds from that photo.

My next project is to go to Hong Kong and climb the steep northeastern hills to take a panoramic photograph.

Among photographic fields that I don’t master myself, I’m impressed by the work of Pan Yue and Bobby Vu.