A change of life
For fifteen years now, I have made photographs. I've spent a great part of my life chasing the light on a face, the texture of skin, the grain of a print. Then, with the gallery, I learned a second craft: giving other people's work its due, standing up for a vision, walking a piece all the way to the moment it finds its place in someone's home.
I never imagined that road would one day lead me to… a furniture handle.
And yet. When the team at Holdon Paris showed me their project, I recognised something deeply familiar. The same obsession with detail. The same conviction that a tiny object — one we brush against ten times a day without ever really seeing it — deserves to be taken seriously. Their line says it all: "Your furniture deserves better than just a handle."
The project. Holdon designs and makes cabinet handles the way one designs a piece of jewellery. Bronze, copper, brass, sometimes a bio-sourced resin: real materials, each patinated by hand, in a Parisian workshop that works to order. The inspiration comes from Haussmann-era ironwork, from forgotten locksmithing, from all that decorative heritage Paris wears on its façades and that no one bothers to take seriously anymore. They do.
What struck me was the freedom of it. Thanks to 3D printing, Holdon creates sculptural forms no traditional foundry would dare attempt. You choose a silhouette, a motif, a finish, a size — and the piece becomes yours. Their collections carry names that sound like a stroll through the 1st arrondissement: Classica Europa, Palazzo, Arabesque. And their motifs — Rosace, Rinceaux, Lion Rugissant, Essentiel — each tell a small story.
Why me, and why now? Because a photographer spends a lifetime understanding how light falls on matter. And there is little more beautiful to photograph than patinated bronze catching the day. My role, in this venture, is to bring that eye: the art direction of the images, the staging of the pieces, that way of making an object exist before you've even touched it. The same craft I practise at the gallery, applied to another medium.
There is, I believe, a real coherence in this. Fine-art photography and the decorative object ask, at heart, the same question: how do we give value, care and meaning back to what daily life has rendered invisible?
That is exactly what this team does — remarkable, demanding, a little obsessive, just the way I like them. I'm proud and happy to have joined them.
Discover the work of Holdon Paris and let yourself be surprised by what a handle can become.
