Mirtho Linguet (French Guiana)

After university studies in French Guiana, Mirtho Linguet studied at the MI21 photography school in Montreuil in 1993. In 1998, he moved to Zurich, Switzerland where he worked for fashion magazines (Edelweiss, Annabelle, GQ, Bolero, Joy, Vogue, FHM, Madame Figaro, Cosmopolitan, The A, ADDICT, Neo 2...) and for advertising agencies. In 1996, he won the Journées internationales de la photographie (JIP) in Arles and participated the following year in the Rencontres internationales de la photographie et de la mode in Hyères. After a one-month residency at Le Point Éphémère in Paris in 2010, he completed a three-month residency in early 2011 at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d'Art in Dijon. Since 2006 Mirtho works and lives in French Guiana. With the photographic series from the project «ALCHIMIE», realized in 2009, he changes his approach in his work. His photography offers a vision that is more frank. He abandons the idea of the smooth image that he considers misleading. In some of his series, although taking the documentary form, his subjects are revealed in full light; the places, materials, bodies and postures remain raw, the faces are without shadow, nor artifices. He aims at preserving the asperities and roughness of his lens. Sometimes an element comes to question the environment in which it takes place, giving the impression of being one with the decor. Today he continues to develop his projects and questions the concept of Universality and the so-called “humanity” of the question of meaning and their manifestations, their implications in the daily lives of men, which they actually produce, beyond words, labels and slogans.