Nicolas Topor’s photography is an art of capturing the passage of time, where everything is slightly sublimated and magnified by an undeniable love of life. Life on the fringes of fantasy, contrasted and a bit dramatic.
It’s also a concrete life, happening in real streets, parties, nature and out there in the world, that becomes a playground for exploration and identification of those electrified moments of magic, where reality manifests its poetry.
Nicolas Topor has a visual intuition to capture those moments - their composition, light, angle, mood being decided within a few seconds. He manages to carry us inside them, allowing us to sense the almost physical encounter of the photographer with reality, with people.
These moments are then arranged into “Untitled Stories” to suggest open ended narrations around different themes. Their “plot” is often driven by visual elements such as color, texture, graphic motifs or recurring physical traits of people. There is also a certain mood in each story, which can be related to aging, gender identity or hedonism. These themes became essential to Nicolas Topor’s practice as a reaction to the terrorist attacks in Paris in 2015 - a starting point for his photography.
Roaming on the fringes of reality and fantasy, inspired by art in its multiple forms, he brings his focus to people when they reveal their energy and grace. Captivated by all manifestations of human condition, he captures sadness, tenderness, anxiety or exaltation with no hierarchy.
Often Nicolas Topor meets his “models” in alternative communities or underground parties with their nocturnal libertine poetry. They are also his friends or random people and other species he meets during his urban drifts or travels.
Nature is another source of inspiration for the photographer. In this spectacle of endless beauty, with a variety of dazzling shapes and colors, he also manages to single out and sublimate instants charged with energy and compositional quality.
Photography for Nicolas Topor is a way of experimenting with life’s poetry. It grants us the right to fantasy and surprise while respecting the authenticity of the world.