jean-paul soujol 1

A native-born Vauclusian, or nearly so, Jean-Paul Soujol lives above the little town of Vaison la Romaine (Provence – France).
Jean-Paul Soujol, overtaken in 2009 by a passion for photography, set out to show what no one else could see. He works with his lenses, his heavy cameras and his tripod like a painter with easel, canvas and paints. Setting up in front of a subject that he has isolated, he waits for the unexpected cast of light, the quirk of cloud, the breath of wind that will make the “captured” landscape not a snapshot of reality or beauty but a creation. And like a painter accustomed to reworking and perfecting back in his studio the sketch he took of the subject, the photographer once returned from his trek sits down at his computer and opens up the raw files that his camera spills out. Playing with contrasts, colour balance, curves, the pixel-detail of the shot, he accentuates its “pictoriality” and adds his own touch. An exclusively landscape photographer, Jean-Paul Soujol moves us toward the abstract and minimalism with the technique of long exposure.
So, bounding waves, under the effect of a long exposure and lack of perspectives, it reappears metamorphosed as haze, cloud, ocean, so many more landscapes born of the one landscape.