Martin Aleman

A French director and photographer based in Paris, Martin Aleman first picked up a camera during a summer in New York, where he had initially considered cinema and discovered instead the immediate energy of making images. Camera around his neck, he walked the city for hours, visited exhibitions and bought film in quantity, never quite satiated by what the streets offered him. That appetite remains visible in images made at speed, receptive to encounters, accidents and every form of novelty. Photographs taken in Brooklyn retain the slightly blurred, imperfect finish of that first exhilaration, while mirrors and unexpected framings introduce the codes of display into spontaneous street scenes. He now works across fashion film and photography, approaching each image as a director, storyboarded and scripted.