ARTIST KEVIN FELICIANNE
Kevin
Félicianne
Fashion photographer. Born in the French West Indies, formed by Paris. Finding pictures in the metro, in a bowl of milk, in confinement.
From Guadeloupe to Tokyo Japanese classes to Paris fashion editorials — Kevin Félicianne on eclecticism, the still life of lockdown, and why looking at everything is the only method he has ever needed.
He came to photography the way most things worth keeping arrive — without planning.
Kevin Félicianne grew up on the island of Guadeloupe in the French West Indies, moved to France at nineteen to study Japanese — first in Toulouse, then at INALCO in Paris — and somewhere in the middle of all that, picked up a Nikon D3100 and pointed it at everything. Insects. Portraits. A strawberry falling into milk, the exact instant of contact captured and kept.
"It is interesting to be eclectic and touch everything," he says. "I am the only child in my family who is keen on photography." That singularity shaped a practice built entirely on self-direction. No teachers, no curriculum. Just looking, then looking harder.
Paris gave him a city to read. He describes walking as research — the metro, the street, a billboard glimpsed from a bus. "I look at my environment while I walk in Paris, whether in the metro or in the street. I look at people, objects and I imagine what I could do as a result in photography." The city as perpetual moodboard. The image forming before the camera is even raised.
When he organizes an editorial shoot, he builds a moodboard in advance and shares it with his team — the image is already made, in some sense, before a single shutter fires. His references are precise: Richard Avedon, Mario Testino, Kevin Sinclair. Fashion magazines. Sometimes a billboard. The surprise of an unexpected frame.
Sometimes billboards can grab my attention. I look everywhere — whether in the metro or in the street, I look at people, objects and I imagine what I could do.
Kevin Félicianne
Then the pandemic arrived, and the city disappeared. "No one could predict the gloom or the impact of the pandemic at the beginning. I struggled between April and June like everyone else quarantined indoors." Without the street, without movement, without the visual noise of Paris, he turned to what was immediately at hand.
It started with chewing gum. Then it became something else entirely — fruits, jewelry, flowers, small feminine objects arranged and photographed with the same attention he gave to fashion editorials. "The concept only continued to get more elaborate... it just took a life of its own." Constraint as creative engine.
By not being able to go outside, I began taking still life photography starting with chewing gum. Something good came out of this difficult confinement.
Kevin Félicianne — on lockdown, 2020
The island is always
in the photograph.
He moves often outside Paris — camera in hand, preferring natural light and open landscapes. There is something in this that traces back to Guadeloupe, to an early visual education shaped by warmth and the particular quality of Caribbean light. He does not speak of it directly, but it is there in the work: an attention to the surface of things, the way skin holds light, the way an environment changes what a subject becomes.
A Paris exhibition last September. The response, in his words, was overwhelming. And ahead — more. Another exhibition, perhaps. "I am open to see what is in store," he says, with the equanimity of someone who has learned to trust his own eye.
I really want to thank all my friends and family who support me, my ideas, exhibitions and who believe in what I do. I am very proud.
Kevin Félicianne
