This exciting five-day course aims to help participants improve their portrait skills. It will be based on constructive, helpful discussions but sometimes they will need to leave their "comfort zone" to break habits and experiment with new things.
Every step in making a portrait will be covered, especially the development of a personal project, but the emphasis will be on light and exchanges with the person photographed. Participants will work on finding the right position and distance from the model.
Relying on Jean-François Robert’s tips and broad experience, they will determine their own ways of interacting with the model. The challenge will involve knowing how to guide the person photographed while giving him or her a degree of freedom and directing a shoot while being ready for surprises and adjusting to what the model sends back.
Light will also have a key place: it allows certain aesthetic choices to be made and brings coherence to a set of portraits. Lighting must be thought out and prepared in advance in order to interfere with the meeting as little as possible while remaining modular and adjustable.
Taking the human being into account and sharing will punctuate the project’s execution. As the days go by, participants will compose a series of portraits based on the many contacts pre-established by the Rencontres d'Arles. 

JEAN-FRANÇOIS ROBERT
Works and lives in Paris.
He photographs anonymes and personality from arts, culture or politics for great magazines as Elle, M le Monde, Télérama, Libération, GQ, Le Monde, Madame Figaro, Marie-Claire, D La Républica, Surface, Stylist, L’équipe Magazine, L’obs, IO Donna, The Times Magazine…
His work is often exhibited and published : "Faces/Public" (Ed Verlhac, 2007) and "Fucking good question!" ( Ed Belles Balades, 2019).
He is represented by MODDS.
Son site personnel : www.jean-francoisrobert.com