"Zuili’s work often delves into the layered histories of urban environments, blending architectural elements with temporal shifts to create images that are both nostalgic and contemporary. His technique involves intentional layering of exposures, resulting in photographs that challenge conventional perspectives and invite viewers to experience familiar cityscapes in new ways."
-LOS ANGELES TIMES
French-American photographer, represented by VU’ agency since 1992 and by Clémentine de la Féronnière gallery since 2016, lives and works mainly in Los Angeles (California, the USA).
Guillaume Zuili makes his first journey in India when he was 21 years old. Fascinated by the former french trading posts, he begins there a black and white photographic work to unveil their nostalgic atmosphere. This long-term project (1986-1995) leads up to two books – ” Les anciens comptoirs français de l’Inde” C*D Publishing, 1992; and “Pondicherry”, Le Chêne publishing, 2003 – and reveals a certain vision of photography: the one which evokes, which transmits sensations, moments, tones.
In 1996, Guillaume Zuili asserts his own universe, which is definitely urban. He travels, questions, explores both cities such as Paris, Berlin, Moscow, Prague, Lisbon, than the photographic techniques which manifest their atmospheres. Through overprints realized at the shoot moment with a photographic chamber, he proposes ” a subjective vision placing the City within a temporality, within an history, within contradictions that become visible only because elements were moved closer by photography ” (Christian Caujolle).
In the 2000s, Los Angeles becomes the territory of his urban and esthetic explorations. Scrutinizing the notions of imprint and sign, questioning the nature of the photographic medium, he mixes techniques while paying a particular attention to prints. Between full sun and night neons, between iconic representation and grain abstraction, he reveals impressions and attires of a fantasized America which does not exist anymore. In 2017 he publishes “Smoke and Mirrors” (Clémentine de la Féronnière publishing) and offers “a sublimated echo of the space we go through and experiment every day. (…) All is served by material, materials, sensualisms layed down and included in the gelatin, in the sheet, in the successive layers worked by the light” (Christian Caujolle).
Prize-winner of 2017 Camera Clara photo award, his works appear within numerous photographic collections among which those of Marin Karmitz (MK2) and of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.