Film Noir has always been my matrix, because cinema is my matrix.
Photography came later, but it all started with movies.
The American Years is French-born photographer Guillaume Zuili’s love poem to his adopted city of Los Angeles and the desert landscape of Joshua Tree. Beginning with the experimental pinhole camera Smoke and Mirrors series in the early 2000s to his mastery of the lith printing process that continues to be his signature, this exhibition chronicles nearly 25 years of the artist honing his craft as both a black and white film photographer and master printer.
The distinctive point of view from which Zuili sees Los Angeles stems from his childhood love of cinema. Profoundly influenced by the genre of Film Noir, he has always seen photography in black and white. The lith printing process enables him to achieve the high contrast and grainy shadows that make his Urban Jungle images so cinematic. With their warm sepia tones and minimal composition, the Joshua Tree series pays homage to classic American Westerns. The viewer needs only to dive into the pictures to make their own movie.
There is something compelling in the way this transplanted Frenchman presents these locations as liminal spaces, located somewhere between myth and reality. It is often said that Los Angeles is not a place – it is a state of mind. Maybe it takes an outsider with fresh eyes to clearly see who we really are.
Born in 1965 in Paris, Guillaume Zuili lives and works in Los Angeles, California. From 1986 to 1995 he worked in India as a photojournalist for VU’ Agency where a body of work documenting the French settlements in India became the subject of his first book, Pondichéry, Chandernagor, Mahé, Karikal, et Yanaon. Beginning in 1996, he pictured Berlin, Moscow, Paris, Prague and Lisbon in a series of double-exposure prints exploring the theme of memory. Since relocating to Los Angeles in 2001, he has experimented with a variety of techniques to capture the essence of the city and its mythology. His pinhole series, Smoke & Mirrors, became a book published by Galerie Clémentine de la Féronnière with whom he continues to exhibit annually at Paris Photo. His more recent cinematic series, Urban Jungle and Joshua Tree, reveal his mastery of the creative lith printing process. Awards include the 2017 Camera Clara Award for Urban Jungle and the 2021 Prix Du Tirage Collection Florence & Damien Bachelot. His work can be found in the collections of the Bibliothèque nationale de France (National Library of France), Paris, France, Marin Karmitz Collection (MK2), and other private collections in the US and abroad.