Gregory Herpe Photography - Ketterinkbraak 5

The difficulty of being a photographer...

It seems so simple to press a trigger or to master the technique of a brand-new device, but what about creating an image, new and moving?

Each piano key plays a fair note. The re, mi, fa are the same whether they are played by a child or a virtuoso.

The difficulty begins when it comes by chaining notes, forming a harmony, creating a rhythm.

There are many performers who, through hard work, can finally play a partition. But only a very few composers, because this is the most complex exercise,

compose a melody, give life to musical phrases, imagine silences, or write a poetry in which each sound harmonize with the other.  

When this work is accomplished, each creation must incorporate the construction of a comprehensive work.

This is exactly what an artist must do when he chooses photography as an expression, tirelessly composing a personal work while continuously varying subjects,

formats, and colors, and yet always with the same instrument.

Gregory Herpe, his camera in his hand, an eye through the viewfinder, composes while scrutinizing the spectacle of life that is before him.

Each photograph is beautiful individually, then when we discover a series, it is a world that surrenders to us. To traverse his work is to plunge into a universe

whose limits are infinite.

Out of curiosity in the universe of Gregory Herpe, I wanted to know his photographs of Barcelona, this city that Miró made me discover during my adolescence,

at a time when only the Catalan was spoken in the Gothic quarter where my grandfather had the boldness to set up an immense gallery for his Spanish artist

friends, Miró, Tàpies, Chillida, Palazuelo, Saura, Valdes and others …

Without any nostalgia, I hoped to live this tumult of images where the epochs collide, finding the contrast between the Gothic of Santa Maria del Mar and the

immense cranes of the neighboring port.

But with Grégory Herpe no banal cliché, no tourist caricature, I had the impression to recover a friend, when life had separated us and nonetheless, before

these photos, I realized that we had never left.

Infinitely more than to show or to describe, the photographs of Grégory Herpe provoke encounters.