“Portraits, reports, social stories, through photography, the mysterious links between beings in their environment and the symbolic orders that bring them together”
At the end of 1979, Michel Monteaux, who was then an assistant film director, left France and began a career as a professional photographer in Los Angeles. Eight years later, he moved to New Mexico, in the High Desert in Santa Fe. While he continued to shoot still life in the studio, he expanded his work to include portraits and photo stories. During the six years that he spent living close to the Indians, embracing their culture, he became involved in a battle against their precarious situation and led – alongside ordinary citizens but also personalities such as Robert Redford – a fight against the gigantic project to bury nuclear waste in southern New Mexico. In the mid-90s, he returned to France and worked for the press (Libération, Marie-Claire, La Vie, Le Monde, Géo, etc.) and for large industrial groups (Alstom, ArcelorMittal, Total, Hachette, etc.). He discovered drawing “on the job”. Spurred on by the more than positive opinions of his family and artist friends, he began to share his work more widely. In 2017, he not only exhibited his photographs but also his drawings and inks at the Frédéric Moisan Gallery in Paris. Michel Monteaux consistently seeks to share what he feels about the geopolitical upheavals around the world, about a society today caught up in a frantic race while our environment is telling us to slow down and think about the world we must change… This will be obvious to anyone who takes an interest in his work which is guided by much more than aesthetic considerations. It is filled with what the photographer and artist is, what he feels, his relationship with others, the environment, society, and the world around him…” Pierre Evrard
