Photographe Christophe Gardner

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Le regard humain
Extrait d'un article de La Dépêche du Midi
Fils d'un professeur américain et d'une journaliste française, Christophe Gardner a vécu une vie cosmopolite en Espagne, aux Etats-Unis, en Israël, au Canada, mais c'est en France, son port d'attache, que sont sa famille, ses liens professionnels et ses souvenirs militaires puisqu'il fut photographe dans la Marine nationale.
Si le cosmopolitisme se retrouve dans ses photos, c'est aussi et avant tout l'unité de l'espèce humaine qui se dégage de ces visages et de ces regards, ces traces d'activité, de création, d'abandon, de génie ou de saccages, et cette intemporalité de la nature qui apparaît dans un éclair d'orage ou dans des enfants sous la pluie.
Christophe Gardner a également publié un livre de photographies dont le titre, «Passages», résume à la fois tout le travail du photographe et l'humanisme dont on l'a souvent qualifié.

L'œil et le cœur
Extrait d'un article de La Dépêche du Midi
Clichés réalisés sur le vif tel un Doisneau, ses photos prises à Paris et Auvillar en témoignent. Recul pris par rapport à la condition paysanne, à l'image d'un Depardon, dans une étonnante série réalisée dans le Morvan. Moments chargés d'histoires, les petites des sujets et la grande en arrière-fond, capturés pour l'éternité. Sur ce point, «La vraie force tranquille», prise en 1981 sur un chantier parisien, et «Le chemin d'Israël», portrait d'une jeune autrichienne sur le départ, expriment sans doute avec le plus de vigueur la sensibilité de Christophe Gardner.

Article by Marilyn Kallet
author of 17 books, including The Love That Moves Me, poetry, and translator of Paul Eluard’s Derniers poèmes d’amour, Black Widow Press.
“It was like seeing twice,” Cézanne once remarked, about his painting. And we might say the same about viewing Christophe Gardner’s photographs. In them we find the everyday world we recognize, but now familiar scenes are set before us more clearly, crisply, through these precise and gleaming photos.

Images we recall and new ones come before us with definition, illumination, and shading.

But then we’re struck by the emotion that infiltrates each photo: the tenderness toward human faces and bodies, the anger at senseless violence, the adoration of places that have been well-lived-in. Our photographer is a poet of the visual, like Neruda who wrote thousands of love poems and odes to common objects, to salt and socks, watermelon and wine.

Christophe Gardner’s work reminds us to love being mortals who are embodied, to observe carefully those around us, to embrace them with our sight. Reminds us that our cities gleam with ancient histories barely buried, that our villages are teeming with hidden angels in unsuspected guises, that red shoes can be jewels and scarves on elderly women can be sculptural.

Christophe’s portraits of children are particularly moving. In one photo by the water, the children are athletic little boy-angels springing into the air. We know they must come down. But not in Christophe Gardner’s photos, where the eternal and the moment meet. The images suggest, do not insist. They are subtle and invite us to return to them. We are seeing not twice, but many times over, through the richness of Christophe’s photographic mastery and memory.

Christophe Gardner was born in Paris in 1960. He is the son of an american professor, founder of several american schools around the world - and of a french journalist and award winning author.

He has lived in several countries including France, Spain, Israel, the United States and Canada, but his work as a photographer has led him to many others.

Christophe Gardner discovered his interest for photography at the age of 13 and is self taught. He served as a photographer in the french navy and until recently worked as a press correspondant. His photographs can be found in private collections around the globe.

He is currently living in the south of France but continues to travel the world.