Born in Marseille in 1975, Guillaume Chamahian mostly lived during his youth in the north of the city. It is a environment made of concrete, marked by the aridity of the functionalism, the ornemental sobriety and the skeleton of the council houses that Guillaume felt his first memorabal aesthetic impressions. He saw his progenitor's father for the first time on a photography black and white with a strong seventy's aesthetic. He has at the time 6 years old.

 

At the age of 15, during a trip to Greece, he experimented the art of capturring what surrrounds him thanks to a black and white disposable camera luckily found on a banch near the Acropole.
Far from holding his strare on the ruins of the antique city, he spontaneously concentrated on the atmosphere and the cityscape. The flies swarmed on a bunch of garbage and the prostitutes in fur coats dressed in the streets of Athens at the height of summer have constituted his main subjects.

His first genuine camera was offered to him at the age of 18 by the girl friend's father, at the time. Himself was a professional photograph of a famous ham selling brand.
This passionate and educationalist man tried then to pass on his know. Unfortunatly the confidence broke up when this men learned that his daughter aged of 15 years old was Guillaume's girlfriend and most of all that his young student regularly shot her naked and maked up like a hooker.

At 18, his entrance in the Beaux-Arts in Marseille enabled him to discover a very wide range of practices and artistic conceptions. Endowed with a spirit of laziness very sharpened and only encouraged by an alcoolic and depressive teacher of photography, he stayed in this school just a year but knew that photography will accompagny him for the rest of his life.

For the fifteen years that followed this revelation, he photographed what surrounded him during the numerous journeys worldwide and the women that he loved as a necessity. But the photographic act is cyclic and it is not rare that eight months passed without he touched his camera. He switched between photography, painting, writing and drawing.

His photographic approach build up by out stanting experience except standards and intimist moments still doesn't allow him to seriously foresee a professional career as a photograph. The images which he produces with obsession surround him and question him whereas he successively works as professor of skate, drug dealer, designer in the streetwear, creator of furniture, salesman of jewels, secondhand goods dealer, DJ, founder of a techno sound system which go through Europe, barman …

At first interested in the city itself, its structure and the way these inhabitants evolve in the space. Nowaday Guillaume's photographic approach from now on affirmed. The eschatology, The study of the end of the human being and the world, is one of his main subject. He particulary attempts to play the human tragedy on the background of aestheticism.
If the plastic concern in the images manufacturing seems to take him on the philosophic position, he nevertheless induced the spectator to wonder about the deep sense of constant back and forth of the humanity between construction and destruction. Houses in decay, buildings intirely abandoned, concrete towers under construction showing disproportionate dimensions sign of a carelessness and an evident pride.

Guillaume photographs the signs of the nonsense of a confrontation: the one of a nature which constantly regains the upper hand over the fragile intentions of the humanity and the humanity against the humanity. In his images, the creative / destructive man has almost already desapeared. These photos of a disturbing atmospheres take in their succession the value of an inventory of fixtures of this world before or after the chaos... See by yourself !