I
was born in Paris, France. Thanks to an open-minded family,
I attended school in Paris, London, Barcelona and several
cities in Germany. I hold degrees in modern languages and
international business.
A
couple of years after college, I did the best thing a young person can
do to widen his/her horizons and gain an understanding of our world and
its wonderful diversity: I set out on a 20month trip around the world,
photographing extensively.
From 1976 to 1981, I lived in Tokyo, becoming a permanent
resident of Japan and teaching at Sophia University. During
that time, I also worked as a freelance photographer and
pursued my research on the origins of Sumo and its ties with
the Shinto religion, resulting in my book Sumo – Le
Sport & le Sacré published in 1984. My years in
Japan have had a profound influence on my life, my
philosophy, and my photography.
I immigrated to the United States in 1982, settling in
Southern California and creating Graphie Int’l, Inc,
specializing in software, multimedia and, later on, internet
technologies. Constant exploration and photography of the
Southwest resulted in the publication of Land of the
Canyons in 1998. In 1999, I permanently switched my
focus from the software industry to a full-time career as a
fine-art photographer, author and publisher, spending a good
deal of my time in the Southwest.
In 2002, I released a set of books entitled Photographing
the Southwest, which sold 12,000 copies in its first edition. In early 2006, I released the first of three volumes of the Second Edition of Photographing the Southwest, with greatly expanded content and full color. The series has been an instant commercial success, not only with my core audience of photographers but also with the general public, and has won the most prestigious award in the publishing industry, the 2007 Benjamin Franklin Award, in the Travel category. To date 35,000 copies of these landmark books have been sold all over the world.
I have been photographing since the age of eleven, paying my
dues to the B&W chemical lab for many years. While in
Japan, I became an early adopter of Cibachrome, enlarging
and processing my own prints.
I prefer shooting 2” medium format. Although I have
shot Hasselblad and Mamiya in the past, I now do the
majority of my photography with two Fuji 645 rangefinder
cameras, which I find well-suited to my style. In the past,
I have also used a 35mm Olympus OM-4 system extensively,
especially for extreme wide-angle and long-telephoto shots.
More recently, I have used Canon and Olympus dSLR cameras.
When shooting film, I use Fujichrome Velvia and Astia
exclusively. In my work, I seek to challenge the imagination
with images characterized by bold colors, unique textures
and a striking sense of depth, ranging from starkly
minimalist compositions to complex abstracts.
laurent@phototrip.us
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