Tonight's queer artist feature is Romain Berger
ROMAIN BERGER is a queer photographer from the French scene, born at the end of the 80s in Normandy.
With a background in film and theatre, he has long been fascinated by images, popular culture, stereotypes and gender issues.
He creates artistic works that are offbeat, kitschy, colourful and gently provocative. He unabashedly claims to be a camp artist, a concept that designates, among other things, a form of self-mockery that allows gay men to laugh at the difficulties of their condition in a homophobic society, all with artifice and exaggeration.
This is why he voluntarily takes clichés from gay culture and twists them in order to highlight our world, both in its best and worst aspects (loneliness, superficiality, overconsumption, violence, addiction, sex, politics ...)
His characters are marginalized, excluded or singled out (gay, women, trans-gender, drag-queen...) who, for the duration of a shot, become heroes/fighters. They are looking for a way out, they want to be stars.
Moreover, he works a lot on weariness and the body. The body is everywhere on social networks and in magazines, it becomes, for many, an addiction to the race for perfection and this allows him, in his photographs, to gently sexualise the bodies of men.
Sensuality is present in each of his pictures, he likes to fantasize about the world, to put his finger on what is disturbing and above all, he wants to make people dream. A shared voyeurism.
It was important for him to keep the magic in his stagings, to trivialise homosexuality and affirm his identity, while bringing strong messages, without falling into pathos or melodrama with dull colours.
Romain Berger
The Art of Being Queer
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