François-Marie Banier

Just-intonation on film I do know, of course, that Banier is a photographer. Yet unlike other photographers, I am somehow unable to imagine him pointing a camera at his subjects. Even though I have stood beside him as he held his camera, I forget that the device that he holds before his eye is a mass produced technology. Rather it begins to appear to me as though it were some kind of curious musical instrument of his own handicraft. Excerpt from the text Just-intonation on film by Shinichi Nakazawa   A Free Spirit The morning Banier and I went round his exhibition at the La Recoleta cultural centre in Buenos Aires, I felt the same sensation as I did the day I first met him, and that came back to me on the occasion of our subsequent conversations. As André Gide used to say, it is easy to break free; it is knowing how to be free that is hard. Extract from the text A Free Spirit by Ernesto Sabato   A Modern Classic "Children born at night have birthdays just like everyone else." Francis Picabia Sincerity is the base on which, for nearly thirty years now, François-Marie Banier has been building up an admirable and singular body of work, far from the established schools and movements. Like Eugène Atget, E.J. Bellocq and Jacques-Henri Lartigue, he has long worked in solitude, in the shadows, neither seeking nor caring to show his photographs, taking them for himself alone and alternating with equal felicity between a fascination with great artists and compassionate interest in ordinary people. [...] Extract from the text A Modern Classic by Patrick Roegiers