“I still crave the buzz of traveling the world, to explore and gaze and make pictures,” says Stephen Dupont to the Phoblographer in an interview. “Every time I go somewhere, it always feels new, even revisiting old places as well, I’m always seeing things with fresh eyes. The challenges to capture powerful and surprising moments in my photography still give me that raw excitement.” Rather than getting bored with the same old things, Stephens enjoys life for what it offers and tries to find new ways to present it in photography books. Part of this is because he’s always working to collaborate with other artists. With his Leica camera in hand, he’s in love with black-and-white photography in a way that so many others share.
This article is presented in partnership with Leica. All images by Stephen Dupont and used with permission. For more, please check out his website, his Leica Story, and Instagram @stephenmdupont.
“…right now I continue to work with my writer friend Jacques Menasche on special book projects. We are currently working on presenting our visions of Homer’s Iliad and The Odyssey which is super exciting. It’s a bit of a cliche, but honestly, I just don’t ever want to stop dreaming about where and how I can move my photography in this very challenging age we find ourselves in.”
Stephen Dupont
Table of Contents
For the Love of Photography
When Stephen Dupont first saw the Magnum exhibition ” In Our Time,” he didn’t realize how it would deeply affect him. Having just returned from a one-year backpacking trip around the world at the age of 18, he was already photographing and starting to feel an affinity for the art form. “That freedom to travel and explore, my camera a tool to probe the unexpected, it’s never left me,” he states. When he entered the exhibition, he believes he was staring at the very soul of humanity. They spoke to him in the ways that we all deeply want to be spoken to and captivated him to want to explore more.
A gift was passed onto me that very day, the gift to truly see and capture the world we live in.”
From that day on, he knew that he wanted to be a nomad with a camera. It’s the dream of so many photographers and people out there. Many of us love to travel the world and take pictures. But to do it for a living? That’s a whole other story.
Eventually, photo books gave him the most inspiration — and so he always made images with the intention of a book in mind. This is far different from making images for social media and hoping that you’re pleasing an algorithm trend. “Because photography these days is so overproduced and cheapened, images fill our phones and screens on mass, like never before, and it feels to me like we’ve lost the vision to be unique and selective,” he explains. “It’s no longer about making great photography for yourself, it is about making photographs that you think others might like (how many likes can I get on Instagram?). It can be soul-destroying, and so in this digital chaos we find ourselves in, I’m going back to the birth of photography, using traditional analog techniques and experimenting with ways to use my pictures to create art that means something to me personally.” For Stephen, he’s been seeing a kind of Renaissance all around him as people are making more photo books.
Stephen uses various tools to do his work. He shoots mostly with a Leica M, M6, M4-P, MP, and the Leica M11. “With film I use the different formats to allow me the creative flexibility of having images that I don’t need to crop and that work well in my book project designs,” he states. “It is a slow and sometimes arduous process, but having these different formats gives me wonderful frames and shapes for design and layouts. With digital, which is what I am using much more these days because of the flexibility, quality and cost effectiveness of it all, my Leica M11’s serve me incredibly well for the kind of photography that I mostly do, which is documentary and street photography.” Mostly, he likes not having to bring around too much camera gear to ensure he doesn’t get too tired. He doesn’t even need to bring a camera bag with him — and for so many photographers, that’s an absolute dream.
Most importantly, Stephen does limited post-production with basic Photoshop processing most of the time. He’s working to make images that look good beyond the screen. It’s not about likes, emojis, etc. That’s why he shoots so much film.
This social media world is doing a very fine, rapid and successful job of killing authentic photography. We’ve lost the art of surprise and excitement that a genuine photo can bring us.
Stephen Dupont
The Creative Side
Lots of Stephen’s beautiful work is in black and white because he finds it to be a beautiful challenge he adores exploring. Because we see in color, he doesn’t find it intriguing. And we totally get that as sometimes it’s almost like we’re capturing instead of creating. Many artistic photographers often call this the struggle between looking and seeing. For Stephen, he feels far more creative.
When we looked at his work, we immediately were able to recognize the sometimes dreamy and ethereal world he’s working to bring to us. It reminded us of Diado Moriyama and speaking about how the camera is an imperfect way to capture reality — which he’s all about. “Many photographers strive for perfection in their work, but Moriyama is right, the camera captures only what the eye sees, a moment in time, all dependent on so many technical and human mechanics that nothing ever captured can be ever truly mastered as true perfectionism,” Dupont states. “The only form of perfectionism is reality and life itself, not any image of it.” He surrounds himself in imperfections and embraces its beauty for what it is. Of course, folks do this in different ways in life. The entire luxury watch industry is all about embracing imperfections.
Of course, he still does shoot in color at times — but his heart is really with black and white.
Authenticity Statement about Stephen Dupont
As part of the Content Authenticity Initiative, The Phoblographer works with human photographers to verify that they’ve actually created their work through shoots. These are done by providing us assets such as BTS captures, screenshots of post-production, extra photos from the shoot, etc. We do this to help our readers realize that this is authentically human work. Here’s what this photographer provided for us.
