Music as Fuel for Photography with Gabrielle Ravet

- Name, age, where are you from, what format you like using, what are you currently working on if you are? 

I’m Gabrielle, I’m 27 years old. I’m from Paris, France. I shoot digital & analog,120 & 35 film, I’m honestly never stuck to one thing, as long as it says what I want to say! I try to have cameras that are easy to use, just so they don’t get too much in the way.

 Currently, I’m preparing for my show at Unruly Collective in Bushwick, which is opening on April 17! Stay tuned for more information!

- What about your surroundings/environments and upbringing interested you? 

When I was 13 years old, I attended my first live music concert. I was raised in a very conservative environment, and fandom was my very first escape from that. It allowed me to meet people from so many different backgrounds, that still felt this exact same deep passion for music that I felt. There’s still nothing that grounds me more than standing in a room where my favorite band is playing, and it fuels my creativity. That’s why I started shooting music photography, and then documenting fans of the bands I like later on.

- When was the first time you met photography? How did you feel when you met it?

My dad loaned me one of his Nikon Coolpix camera when I was 12, and I really fell in love with taking pictures of anything. Then, I got my first DSLR for Christmas that year and became my high school’s ‘photographer’. I would always take pictures of people during lunch break, on school’s trips. I just loved snapping pictures of the people in my life. It gave me a small purpose, when I was bullied a lot at school before.  It’s probably the least I ever thought about what i was doing and the most fun I had.

- Tell us about current projects you have been working on (could be any, or just work you have been doing in general). Is this story inspired out of personal reasons, or others? What are you most excited about in these projects? 

Most of my work is about music fandoms. I think fangirls are often disregarded by society for being hysterical & intense (behaviors that if done by men, for football for example, are never questioned), which is why I decided to document this world, to show how awesome they are.

Currently, I’m trying to shoot as many people I know in the My Chemical Romance community, and interview them to show their stories to the world. It can be fans, the musicians, but I’m specifically interested in people that impacted me personally and/or are also creatives in the music industry. The band is touring this summer so I’m hoping to do a documentary about fans attending the shows, since a lot of people will be travelling for it.

My very first solo show will be up next month at Unruly Collective. I feel very excited and proud about that, because watching audiences that might be unfamiliar with the band react positively and want to learn more about that world too makes me very happy. 

Empowering fans is my way of giving back to a community that helped me grow so much as a professional and individual.

- How did you find your visual literacy? Why are you attracted to certain images more than others? 

I attended a one year certificate program at the International Center of Photography last year, and two teachers truly inspired me to find my right visual literacy: Jesse Chan, my darkroom teacher in both black and white and color, and Frank Franca, my lighting teacher. 

I think my relationship to light in general really defined my style, and when I combined lighting and film and printing, it was just beautiful to me, especially when printing in the color darkroom. Without the knowledge of my mentors, I would have had difficulties finding that. I liked combining a gritty, contrasty lighting style, with the beautiful colors you can only find when printing in the darkroom. If i don’t have time to go print, I still apply that color literacy to my scans or digital images.

Inspiration wise, for my documentary work, I’m very attracted to the diaristic genre, to images that also have some kind of humoristic aspects to them. I just love artists whose styles fall into these categories. If I can immediately pinpoint who made an image, I also immediately love the artist. It’s such a difficult thing to find yourself and differentiate yourself from others in the photo world that it’s very appealing to me to see people do that.

- Imagine meeting someone who is picking up a camera for the first time. What do you tell them?

Have fun with it. Anything is possible, even your biggest photography dreams are attainable. Dream big, but always remember to have fun as I said.