« The Villains » by Yves Lacroix

 

« The more successful the villain, the more successful the picture » Alfred Hitchcock.

The universe of thrillers is fascinating as it awakens our secret fears, our deep rooted fascination for evil, which we usually keep under control but that can emerge at any moment.

When I was young, I used to watch James Bond movies and I came to the conclusion that the stronger and charismatic the villain, the better the movie.

My name is Yves Lacroix and I am a photographer.

I think I was born to create different universes. Universes that come to life through images, pictures. But these pictures are like the still frames of a film that plays inside myself.

I am a photographer and I dream of cinema.

Director of still frames i dream about them coming to life. I am mad about almost every frame of Sergio Leone’s films - masterpieces of their genre - and also thrillers by Nicolas Winding Refn, David Lynch and Na Hong-jin. My universe is inhabited by this kind of film culture.

Through my work with The Villains series, in which I have been working for over 10 years, I wanted to create a cinematographic image, and to pay tribute to these antagonistic characters.

In these pictures, I create movie scenes, I produce strong and compelling, sometimes parabolic, still frames.

I take my audience with me so as to bring them to a crossroads. From there, they create the film that fits the story

With this view in mind, I give my audience a certain amount of clues, thus enriching the image as much as possible and taking care of every detail : the setting, of course, but also the light, the decor, the atmosphere. Therefore my photography is meant to be displayed in large format prints.

I also supply them with comprehension clues, by naming each picture.

I then let them imagine what is next. This « cinema » born inside my head then develops its own scenario in the viewers’ heads. It is up to them to finish the film, despite them or for their greatest pleasure. A breath of fresh air is then given to my own obsessions and fantasies.

Eventually, our definition of evil is variable. It is a moral value that can be interpreted from different angles. Individuals can seem scary or look like murderers, but does this mean that they are really unbalanced?

Where does evil really resides ? It is one of the starting points of my work: to combine violence, absurdity, irony and nightmares, but also to bring a careful thought about our society for viewers to be able to question their own prejudgements. That is why I try to cover all forms of evil.

Like in all good thrillers, for their story to be truly fascinating, we need to have a real villain. The stronger, crueller and more evil the villain, the better the film and its hero. It is all this that my project « The Villains » tries to highlight.