Maxime Chanet and the Lomo'Instant Wide : When Paris looks like Gotham

For our exhibition at Bar à Bulles in Paris, we comisionned 3 Parisians photographers to do a photo shot with our Lomo'Instant Wide. Today, we met with one of them : Maxime Chanet.

Hello Maxime, how are you and what have you been up to lately?

I’m fine thanks! I’ve been really busy and I have exhibitions coming up!

What inspires you?

I have many sources of inspiration… It’s not easy to choose only one but to mention the most important I would say music. I’ve been a "music worm" since my teenage years and I still spend nights on Youtube listening to everything I find. It helps me to get ideas and put me in the mood for my shootings.
I’m also inspired by some artists like Ed Templeton or Alec Soth. I look a lot at skateboard photo archives of the early 90’s these days, with photographs by people like Atiba Jefferson or Tobin Yelland, or Spike Jonze’s debuts.

Tell us a bit about the photos you shot.

I wanted to do something else than I usually do. I’ve already used the Lomo’Instant Wide during a month trip in the United Sates to shoot really sunny stuff with people. I’ve just moved in a new neighborhood in Paris called La Chapelle and I love this nocturnal and graphical environment with the shops' storefronts and neon lights. For this photo session I wanted to make Paris look like Gotham, dark and dense, to transform buildings into trains and to play with the railroads surrounding this neighborhood.

What song should we listen to when we look at your pictures?

Broadcast - Tender Buttons!!! With headphones and really loud!

What do you like about instant photography?

It’s really instinctive! Sometimes it’s tricky but it’s very very strong, it’s like “I stole your soul and I put it in my pocket”! It’s beautiful and sad at the same time! It’s really interesting to play and experiment with it and it’s also great to use it just to keep a souvenir.

What advice would you give to someone using the camera for the first time?

Don’t hesitate to use a tripod to shoot. Use the flash and take selfies haha! More seriously, I’m a big fan of the landscape mode with the focus set on infinite, so I would advice using this mode. And I would also say to spend time experimenting with the multiple exposure, it’s a really cool mode!

On which occasions would you recommend using the Lomo'Instant Wide?

When traveling! It’s really great to have it to shoot live moments, it’s the kind of cameras to have if you want to shoot fast!

You can read a previous interview of Maxime and see photos he shot with the Petzval here.
Discover Maxime's work : Maximechanet.com / Maxime-chanet.tumblr.com / Facebook & Instagram.

2018-01-24 #people