Blaise Marceau’s Artist Statement
Capturing the natural beauty of the wilderness through photography goes hand in hand with my passion for the outdoors. I constantly want to go mountain biking, hiking, fishing, backpacking, camping, and driving through Maine. This presents countless opportunities for a photographer.
In my work I merge environmental portraiture and landscape photography. Combining genres and blurring the lines between them can result in more complex photographs than if I followed predefined conventions. Traditionally in environmental portraiture, you can identify the subject in the landscape. My spin on this form of portraiture is that you cannot distinguish the people in these pictures. This puts more focus on the figure as a whole and less on their identity.
In terms of landscape, I am always looking at spatial information. For example, in the last photo I took what made me excited about the site was a broken fence in the foreground. This contributes to depth of field, which is achieved when there is a foreground, background, and substantial space between them. This makes the photograph feel very open.
For each photoshoot, I stage an event where someone is involved in an unclear narrative within the landscape. This changes the attitude of the photograph and pushes the viewer to consider the scene on a deeper emotional level. With this approach, I am layering information and joining artifice and realism. More specifically, I satisfy artifice by directing my subject to hold specific poses. At the same time, I keep a sense of realism by staying faithful to the natural features of the landscape.
I am staging unresolved moments that exist between a ‘before’ and ‘after’ in order to offer a deeper psychological experience. It is the emotional and mysterious sublayer in these images that may keep the observer thinking about them.