While clearly indebted to the photography of Ryan McGinley, Nan Goldin and Larry Clark, and in contrast to the “pseudo-fiction” of McGinley’s work, the characters in Théo Gosselin’s images are friends rather than models, and the scenes are not mythical constructs but a window onto an “underground” way of life in a post-9/11, post-AIDS world in which social media have blurred the boundaries between private and public, and between “being told” and simply “being”.
Deliberately cinematic, Théo Gosselin’s photography reveals friends escaping from their normal lives, toward seductive and perilous lifestyles, always in search of the persistent and elusive idea of freedom…