This photograph was taken during a representation of the sleeping beauty at the Paris Opera. Here, Eléonora Abbagnato plays the princess, and Mathieu Ganio plays the prince.

The artist transformed an old lenses that belonged to his grandfather to obtain his particular effect.

What is Catharsis?

Catharsis is a very personal and abstract approach to dance. Employing a new vision and technique, the artist attempted to capture the energy radiated by the dancers during their performances and its diffusion into the surrounding space.

Each ballet imbued him with strong emotions, urges, apprehensions, and fantasies that he tried to transpose into photographic thoughts, like childhood memories.

The result is powerful images that, through their distortion and natural abstraction, tell other stories. Thus, when looking at these photographs, the observer is permeated by the energy and emotion they transmit, and left free to interpret them personally.

In Situ evokes the immersion of the photographer in the ballet of the Paris Opera during the 2013-2014 and 2014-2015 seasons.

Discreetly blending in with the dancers, the artist observed their movements, sharing their lives at the Opera House. He created three series for In Situ and catharsis is one of them.

Together, these series are a testimony of the artist’s awareness and complicity of his subjects and his originality in exploring the environment of the Ballet in all its mythical splendor.

"I don't like having preconceived ideas. I like that it evolves. However, I studied dance and more specifically the Paris Opera through books, documentaries, films, and interviews for several years to have an open mind to anything that could happen to me. Hence the 3 series, Confidences which is an intimate series of daily testimony, then Catharsis which is more abstract, and Analogia, a series of stagings made with 11 dancers from the Paris Opera ballet corps."