Franck Glénisson was born in gasoline, so to speak. His parents used to own a motorcycles’ garage in the central France region… a somewhat desultory harbinger of the struggle embodied in his photographs which combine the “pure” beauty of the human machine with the dark alteration of an outside world where everything is threatened by dirt. In his vision of nature, clouds are thundering, the fog is looming, the sun fading away while shadows threaten to swallow people… His city is an old wall, the corner of a deserted street, a ghost building or a garage where men and women seem forsaken.
So where do his photographs take their fierce beauty from? Probably from the sharp grace of human faces and bodies, their living force, their almost organic truth which always overcome surrounding threats with a defiant energy.
Franck Glénisson confesses that at age 14 –much to his family’s despair - he would turn his grand-mother into a combination of Barbara Cartland and Alice Cooper, before he was taught by the school punks how to structure make-up.
Of course time goes by: punks’ spikes and the queen of wishy washy love stories have now disappeared… Franck Glénisson is now a photographer. Still, in his official works for most prestigious fashion magazines in Paris, New-York and London and even more so in his very personal “stories”, one can feel the influence of a cinema inspired by devouring feelings, a proud and compact strength, a soulful human resistance and an obstinacy to defend the individual. Could it be that true punks and the old pink Queen are not dead yet?