About Les Chevaliers Photographes
An unconventional couple in life, an improvised duo of photographers, the Chevaliers Photographes initially had a simple desire to share their wild love, artistic, and sexual adventure through photography, which they experience together and with their lovers. Bodies intertwine, lounge, taste, kiss, offer themselves, connect, unleash.
They then narrate the world – their world – a sort of magical bubble in which they regularly find themselves. Tireless explorers, thirsty for new adventures to live and relive; pleasure enthusiasts, whimsical hedonists, somewhat poetic, they testify – as an act that is at least committed if not explicitly political – to what they bring to each other, to the happiness they share, defying their own (or our?) prohibitions, questioning sexuality and the taboos it evokes, as they involve themselves in their own photos, and dream of an even greater world where everyone can live in their own way, in total freedom, proudly.
It is in this spirit that Les Chevaliers Photographes began their collaboration in 2018. In 2020, they will contribute to the Lusted Men catalogue and organise their first exhibition, divided into two chapters: Secret Archives and Censored. Some of these photos are also exhibited at the Galerie d’Art Concorde, while they receive an honourable mention at the ND Awards for the photo ‘Mount Fuji‘. In 2022, their ‘Hands‘ series was selected for the Love&Sex Festival (broadcast online due to the pandemic), three photos from their ‘Secret Archives’ series were selected for the Merlinka LGBT Festival (Serbia).
However, the world in which they live and develop is one in which they are fully aware of the taboo and censorship associated with sexuality. They decided to address the issue and in 2023 wrote a manifesto for a positive and liberated vision of sexuality. They revisited their ‘Censored’ series, which became ’69-Censored’, and censored their own work, questioning the way sexuality is often viewed and proposing a different semantics for it. They are interviewed by Colette Se Confesse, Le Parisien, to share their thoughts on sexuality.
In parallel, they develop the series “And Tomorrow Will Be Tenderness”, like a moment of calm where bodies extract themselves from a too brutal world; “L’Hexagone des fantasmes” (The Hexagon of Fantasies), where they stage the possible fantasies of a couple; “Quand un dino rencontre une licorne” (When a Dino Meets a Unicorn), a fairy tale about the unlikely encounter of two beings who are completely different…
In 2024, they were twice selected for the Guest Room of the prestigious DER GREIF website: by Nadine Isabelle Henrich, Curator of La Maison de la Photographe at the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg, and William Camargo, artist photographer and founder of Latinx Diaspora, for their photos from Secret Archives; then by Renée Mussai, curator and author, and Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński, artist and author, for their photos from the ‘Et demain sera tendresse’ series. At the same time, Lusted Men is announcing the publication of 3 of their photos from various series in their forthcoming edition
Alongside all this work, as the 2020 pandemic evokes an ongoing cataclysm for them, they embark on a new environmentally-focused project, photographing urban and natural landscapes that evoke a “Kataclysm_e.” The captivating beauty of these ruined landscapes reminds us of the fragility and resilience of nature, as well as our responsibility as human beings. Yet, these on-site photos also reveal glimpses of another possible world because they challenge lifestyles and individual and collective choices that have led to this critical situation. Selected for the 2022 Emois Photographiques Festival, these photos are publicly exhibited for the first time, and they are nominated for the 7th Emois Photographiques Prize .They are proposing a slide show in the form of a film in March 2024 and Corridor Elephant is planning an exhibition on their site for the 4th quarter of 2024.