Sherif Elhage

Love the photography by Sherif Elhage. I especially like one of his series called White, the pictures seem to have been edited in photoshop, erasing some of their parts, these parts are totally overexposed! Sherif says that the photographs haven't been edited with any digital program, so he explains us a little about the process;

"The process is not difficult but it took me years to build this body of work, somtimes it does not work correctly, you need to have a loot of light and overexpose the photos with the camera settings, sometimes it's with the apperture process and sometimes it's about time so it hapened to me to use a tripod during the daytime, it's the same with black photos but in an inverse way, I never use the normal settings of the camera. White surfaces naturally are always more exposed than the other colours.

I use a digital camera so it's faster to see immediatly the result, but it's not always good...what you see on the small lcd screen is very different from what you get on your computer screen or on a print, so sometimes i have to go back to do the same photo with better settings and conditions."

Sherif Elhage was born on the 25 of March 1980 in St Petersbourg , and raised in Beirut, by a Russian-Estonian mother and Lebanese father, he now lives Between Paris and Nice. This autodidactic artist lists Nicolas de Staël , Otto Steinert and Harry Callahan, as primary influences. Sherif often plays with over-exposure to question his photographs and proudly applies no corrective methods to his art. His work has no literary or transcendental significance, he declares. The elements of their aesthetic, however, are fundamental to Elhage—the composition of color and original framing, in particular. Using a combination of optical trickery and inventive minimalism, his work contrasts with traditional iconography.