Julian became interested in photography when he was at school, he went on to study it at the Royal College of Art in London. He published many books which include combinations of both his own photographs and family archive photographs. Julian believes in the value of of amateur photographs which is shown in one of his recent books called ‘ For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness’ which was published in 2005.
Julian’s website – http://www.juliangermain.com/
‘For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness’
‘ He was my antidote to modern day living’
This book is about an elderly man names Charles Albert Lucien Snelling from Portsmouth who Julian photographed for 8 years. He met Charles through a coincidence in 1992 when he was on his way to photograph the Portsmouth V Nottingham Forest cup and was attracted to the house because of it’s bright yellow colour. Through out the photo book there is a substantial amount of photographs which include flowers this is because Charles sold flowers and plants outside his home. ‘ He loved flowers and the names of flowers’. Which helps us to understand his personality a bit more. Julian included scans of pages from Charles personal archive which include his wife who had past away 2 years before, but is a big part of his life. He shows this by including various archival portraits of Charles’ wife. I think this is really important and gives us an understanding of what his life was like before and what it is like now. However i’m not sure how the title links to the story but I think it may be something to do with Charles’ wife.
I decided to do some research about Julian Germain because although he is a documentary photographer he takes a different approach to it than most other photographer for example Eugene Smith. This is because he photographs are staged, Julian manipulates the way the photographs look by telling his subjects what to do and planning what he wants the photographs to look like in advance. Where as Eugene Smith has a more traditional approach to documenting. He doesn’t interfere with the subject and uses the camera as more of an eye witness and ‘documents’ the situation. Therefore Julian Germain pushes the boundaries between what is real and what is not because he is staging the photograph it could be argued that the scene is not real which links in with the exam title truth and fiction.
