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Living With Art

Whenever he is in Montauk, the photographer Albert Delamour heads to the beach twice a day, just before dawn and again at dusk, with his fishing rod and a digital camera or a drone. From the shoreline of the easternmost point of Long Island, he looks out to sea and imagines he can see his native France. Though sometimes he will reel in a fish, the true purpose of these shore walks is to catch the play of light on water with his lens. Sunrise, sunset–timeworn images that are the stuff of picture postcards. But Delamour isn’t interested in the familiar. Or rather, he is–but only to the extent that he can subvert the viewer’s expectations by rendering a commonplace fresh and new. He achieves this through techniques borrowed from painting and sculpture, overlaying such materials as silver and gold leaf on his photographic ‘canvasses,’ which he finishes with lacquer. The results are images that are anything but static. Delamour’s seascapes possess a dark beauty, an undercurrent of menace. And their tonal values change in response to the light and time of day.

Born in the Montmartre district of Paris, the photographer has spent many years looking at the sea at eye level and from high in the sky. As a youth of sixteen, he enlisted in the French Air Force. It was there, during his first months at the base, that he learned to take pictures with an old 35 mm Nikon. Before long he was sent on reconnaissance flights, photographic equipment in tow. At twenty, he left the Air Force and soon earned a spot in the photography program at Paris’s prestigious École national supérieure Louis-Lumière. After graduation, he went to work as a studio hand for the fashion photographer Henri Coste whose images of a young Brigitte Bardot were the talk of nineteen-fifties Paris. After years at Coste’s side, Delamour opened his own photography studio. Although he did the odd bit of catalogue photography, he made a name for himself in the fashion world, working with such designers as Christian Le Croix and Jean-Paul Gautier.

In 1998, he made a two week visit to New York. Charmed by the warmth and exhuberance of the city’s inhabitants–so different from Parisian reserve and froideur!–he decided he would like to stay. He sold his business, closed up his studio, and with his wife, gallerist Michele Mariaud, he relocated to a loft at the edge of Manhattan’s Chinatown, where the couple and their teenage daughter live and work today.

Though Delamour’s ouevre is neither limited in subject matter nor geography to the East End of Long Island–see his Icons series, conceived as a homage to Caravaggio and other Old Masters–it’s true that the area has inspired some of his most beguiling images. Consider, for example, La nave va et vogue le navire (And the Ship Sailed On) a photograph of a wedding party–the bride and groom are friends of Delamour–at the East Hampton Golf Club. In the hands of a lesser artist, this work could have been nothing more than an anodyne group portrait. But by placing a rising tide in the foreground while the smiling, blinkered guests, staring out from the deck of the ocean liner-like club, fill the background, Delamour presents us with a kind of darkly comic shipwreck.

Happily, the photographer’s own domestic life seems to rest on terra firma. His photographs figure prominently on the walls of the Michele Mariaud Gallery alongside works by other members of Mariaud’s stable. Delamour’s studio is in a back room and the family’s quarters are at the edges of the floor-through loft. One feels that for this artist, there are no boundaries between making art and the business of living.

To see more of Albert Delamour’s work, please visit www.albertdelamour.com and michelemariaudgallery.com

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