Jacques is a Los Angeles native, with a Master’s degree in French Literature from UC Santa Barbara. The award-winning photographer has participated in over 150 exhibitions, most recently including LACMA, Southeast Museum of Photography, the Chinese Academy of Fine Art in Beijing, China, PhotoNola and the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum, and is included in several of these museum’s permanent collection.

Writer Dave Barton describes Jacques Garnier’s recent series titled “Hymns to the Silence” as an “echoing of the familiar amidst the unknown…. His imposed photographic manipulation of already severe modernist facades serves to draw one’s eye back to the austerity at hand, as well as the beauty that might otherwise go unnoticed. While the still, contemplative variances of the architecture grips our imagination, Garnier’s separation of design from function, sans context as distraction, gives us reason to rethink both.”

Artist Statement:

Photography, as with most arts, is the exploration of a vision, a poetic interpretation of what is seen or perhaps even unseen. In seeking this essence, I have embraced a more minimalist Zen-like approach, utilizing strong graphic elements with liberal use of negative space to eliminate the clutter – the distractions in an effort to see more clearly what is before us. Once the superfluous has been removed, what is left is more open to contemplation – a meditation freed from some of the chaos that surrounds us.