About Hughes Léglise-Bataille / Hughes Léglise-Bataille  

Sometime in 2005, I was looking for a place to share some vacation pictures and ended up on Flickr. Back then, I had no particular knowledge nor interest in photography, but exploring the site and browsing through others' work picked my curiosity, and pushed me to experiment it for myself. All I had was a little "point-and-shoot" Casio, and the results were frustratingly bad anyway ! Then on November 1st, after a sleepless night watching photos, something "clicked". I left home before dawn and for the first time in my life, went out to "take pictures". That was a revelation, and since then, I've been hooked !

Time has passed but photography for me is still synonymous to going out, walking and discovering. In parallel with street photography, I'm also trying to cover some of the events, mostly in Paris but also abroad (G8 in Germany, elections in Pakistan and Bolivia) as part of a "photojournalism" attempt.

The latter has been mentioned in articles about citizen journalism in newspapers Le Monde and Le Figaro as well as French TV channel LCI, with photos featured in Le Journal du Dimanche, CNN Exchange, RMC Info, BBC World, Salon, German MAX magazine (April 06 issue) and the cover of JPG magazine (Street Photography issue). My submissions to National Press Photographers Association - Best of Photojournalism 2007 were awarded the 1st places in the News and Photojournalism categories for Amateurs Photoblogs.

In June 2008, I finally decided to put an end to a 13-year career in investment banking to dedicate myself to photojournalism. In Sept. 2008, I was awarded in Perpignan the "Tremplin Photo" grant for a 6 month formation at the EMI-CFD.

I'd like to thank all the people who have taken the time to comment on my photos, with a special thanks to the ones who gave me some guidance and support, as well as all the incredibly talented photographers whose work has been an inspiration.

I hope you enjoy viewing my photos as much as I enjoy taking them !

Hughes

Contact:
hughes.leglise [at] gmail.com

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Some quotes:

"Un des problèmes réels auxquels les rédacteurs en chef comme le photographes doivent faire face est le nombre de pages limités dévolu à la photo. Au début de ma carrière, je cherchais le moment le plus dramatique, susceptible de transmettre l'essence d'un évènement en une seule image. Je guettais ces moments avec une sorte d'instinct viscéral, un mélange d'adrénaline pure, ce qui m'amenait à exclure presqu'entièrement les détails donnant un cadre à l'évènement en question. Dans l'Enfer, je cherche à traiter les évènements plus globalement et plus en profondeur -en leur donnant une qualité narrative, cinétique, qui rende compte non seulement de la structure propre à l'image unique, mais aussi des relations entre les images. C'est une tentative pour dépasser la simple collection des soi-disant "meilleures photos" afin de faire sentir le flux des évènements: un mouvement réel, qui se poursuit en dehors de la présence d'un photographe. Je me suis efforcé de saisir les moments qui précèdent et qui suivent le moment décisif, et de tenir compte de l'accumulation de détails parfois répétitifs qui informent la réalité."

James Nachtwey, postface of L'Enfer.


*****

One agency photographer remembers meeting Antonin Kratochvil at a Croatia refugee camp, thinking he was some shaggy-haired old loser who got there too late. “I got everything,” he boasted, “food distribution, water queue, ICRC doctors, tents, kids being vaccinated, the whole story. Now I’m going to file." Kratochvil looked at him and said, "You missed it. It’s about boredom, baby, boredom."

Seen in Dispatches
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I'm Male and Taken.

http://www.lightstalkers.org/hughes_leglise_bataille
Paris, France