Bio

Hillel Winograd is a photographer. The man is marginal. He stands at the edge of the world, in perpetual search for balance. He never stood in the evidence of speech. It is silently and quietly that he considers reality. He waits for his turn, surrounded by a grace that emanates from him. He gleans the precious moment, the slightest detail where the splendor of life shines through. He says, “Making a photo is like catching the ideal.” He holds to life, and he sticks to it. Shooting is an essential link to others, a necessity to stay upright, alive, alert. And it is still standing that he tames the world by photographing it, in an ultimate attempt to put away the change of scenery. Hillel Winograd is a gleaner of images, a collector of signs, a collector of moments. He is an indefatigable seeker of infinity. He travels the streets of Paris, he picks the real, which wants to be seared. He aspires to another reality that he applies to drawing. In the accumulation of images, a plot is formed, the photographer, the man seeks his truth. Hillel Winograd plays his part, he sets reality to music and the characters chosen from the street dance all around him. Beyond black and white, it is the colours of life that he raises as his standard, it is the reflected light that he catches in each face emitting clarity, the personal and secret light. Hillel Winograd is the Indian who follows the trail of the wounded animal in everyone he meets, in all of us. He does not represent a world, he presents a world before our eyes, he makes it his own, it is his path of adventure that he follows with rigorous fidelity. He obeys a kind of inner imperative, obliterating his presence at the same time as affirming it by capturing his subjects at a given moment in their lives. He captures in the moment the particular brilliance of the beings he photographs. He follows the living animal beyond the wounded man. He brings them back to life. By renewing the moment ad infinitum, he gives each person a new life. The light of each existence seems all the more intense, bursting through the darkness to reach our very heart. The subject of his work is not black and white, but the light of the beings he reveals. He knows how to recognise the intensity of a physical, sensual presence, imbued with an often subdued energy that honours him each time he begins again. Hillel Winograd seems unaware that it is he himself that he is looking for in all those he likes to look at, that it is he himself in infinite variations that he finds in all those he likes to take in his light where white contrasts so vividly with black.