A photographic essay by Frédérick Carnet: First of January 2106. Rügen. An island in northern Germany plunged into a strange atmosphere, post-apocalyptic, that reminds me of the movie The Road (2009, John Hillcoat). And if that day was the last first day of a fragile peace? This photographic essay, like many of my last series, is shot in a total state of freedom. Here, the serie was even shot spontanously while I was walking with my girlfriend on the beach of Prora, a small town of Rügen Island, after a quiet new year’s eve evening. If I was influenced by the atmosphere of the movie The Road, I was also thinking of our past history. Prora was chosen by Hitler to become a summer resort for 20.000 workers between 1936-1939. And that specific day, my mind went back to this terrible time of Europe history. I then started to think of our present and the fact that our future is uncertain. I was then asking myself : “Is this 1st of january the last one we will live in peace ?”
Frédérick Carnet (born French the 24th of December 1972) took his first steps in photography at the age of twenty, at the beginning of the 90’s thanks to a friend, a fashion photographer, who introduced him to a world of which he did not know the existence. He very quickly decided to do everything in his power to turn professional. He therefore started to display his work with the FNAC Galleries network. Rather than becoming a photographer’s assistant, Frédérick Carnet preferred to work in Toros Aladjajian’s black and white photography laboratory, whilst pursuing his personal work. It was during his part-time activity in the laboratory that he accomplished 3 series : L’Appartement 33, Eclipses and Une Histoire Comme Si.
Between 1998 and 1999, whilst he was in the middle of completing the Eclipses serie dedicated to Hip Hop Culture in Cergy (Val d’Oise – France), he was awarded a Special Honour of the Kodak Prize for Photography Criticism, a scholarship from the Regional Fund of Contemporary Art of Ile-de-France (FRAC Ile-de-France) and an honour as one of the finalists of HSBC Prize for Photography. From 2000 onwards, his desire to dedicate himself to shots exclusively increased. He finally left Toroslab in 2002 and worked as a photographer for press and advertsing agencies. Frédérick Carnet also attached a lot of importance to the development of his personal series. It was also in this frame of mind that he produced La X in collaboration with Djamel Bouchaïb and Budoka no Kokoro with Léo Tamaki.
In January 2011, Frédérick made the decision to put his career on hold as an advertising photographer. New adventures awaited elsewhere. The first one started in Japan from October 2011 to January 2012 with a photographic study of Nature. From this serie, Frédérick published a book and an exhibition, Nippon 2011. Then, he spent 3 months in Iceland to shoot 4 stories under the title The Sun will note hide behind the hill tonight. From this time he didn’t stop producing personal work in Spain, Germany or France in a full state of freedom. From January 2015, he dedicates his time to his personal artistic projects only. He now lives in Saxony (Germany).
Website: frederickcarnet.com
