This series of black-and-white portraits captures the faces of the people who surrounded Denis Dailleux as he was growing up — a world oscillating between tenderness and tension, love and resentment. Created when he was just 25 years old, at a moment of personal doubt and self-reflection, the project marked a decisive turning point in the photographer’s artistic journey.
With his characteristic sensitivity,
Dailleux blends form and emotion, using photography as a means of introspection. Through the portraits of these familiar figures, he revisits fragments of his childhood: summer Sundays spent with family, the quiet observation of plants, and the subtle choreography of everyday life. Each image becomes a mirror of memory — both intimate and universal — reflecting the complex ties that bind us to the places and people of our past.
Denis Dailleux
Born in 1958 in Angers, France.
Lives in Cairo. Imbued with his distinctive delicacy, Denis Dailleux’s photographic work appears calm on the surface, yet is incredibly demanding, run through by an undercurrent of constant self-doubt and propelled by the essential personal bond he develops with those (and that which) he frames with his camera.
His passion for people has naturally led him to develop portraiture as his preferred means of representing those whose true self he feels an urge to get closer to. Which he has, with actress Catherine Deneuve as well as with countless anonymous subjects from the slums of Cairo, working with the same discretion, waiting to get from his subjects what he is hoping they will offer him, without ever asking for it, simply hoping that it will happen. That is how he has patiently constructed a unique portrait of his beloved Cairo to create, with black and whites of exemplary classicism and colors of rare subtlety, the definite alternative to the heaps of cultural and touristic clichés which clutter our minds.
Christian Caujolle
www.denisdailleux.com
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