Sébastien Girard – Starring (sign.)
Tabloids turn out the stars : Starring deconstructs them. Photography draws the stars closer to their public : Starring distances them. Starring is a book about photography.
In Starring, the systematic use of a loresolution halftone conveys the idea of image deterioration, a wearing-out resulting from the excessive reproduction of these very same images.
Taken, printed and then digitized, shrunk, enlarged, constantly captured and recaptured into different analogue and digital formats, these photographs of stars are here put back into perspective by an artistic process which, in so doing, becomes a critical process.
The book deprives us of any illusion of proximity towards these personalities, buried page after page in their own imagery.
Starring was born from the obsession of a photographer collecting online digital photographs. Saving scans of pictures from websites selling lots of tabloid clippings, I started collecting these derisory materials. Then, from their very insignificance, I invented a book.