Olivier Cablat — À propos — Slash Paris

A many-faceted maker of photographs, Olivier Cablat is as much attracted to commercial zones built along the lines of Las Vegas as to all the waste matter that issues more or less directly from them: cheap discs, statuettes, portraits of Colonel Gaddafi, etc. Using a documentary style, the better perhaps to emphasise the ambiguous nature of the relationship between photography and reality, he seems to be constructing a monumental oeuvre that endlessly questions the descriptive character of the images — a body of work that might be intended for ethnologists of the future, but for whom he complicates the task by constantly re-writing the interpretive rules. After graduation from the ESBAM, Marseille, in 2000 he gained a post-graduate diploma at the ENSP, Arles, in 2003. He then worked as a documentary photographer for the CNRS in Egypt. Since 2004, he has been a regular tutor in digital image-making at the ENSP, Arles. He was the founder of the gallery and publishing house 2600, and is an active participant in the development of self-publishing and self-production systems for artists of the digital generation.