Sébastien Salamand, known as Le Truk, is showing his photography exhibition Burlesque at the Quai des Artistes in Monaco until April 11th. 

Le Turk is a photographer, but the title barely covers it. He designs and builds every set himself, sometimes over several weeks, using wood, polystyrene, cardboard and a mix of natural and artificial lighting. His models are worked on by make-up artists for hours before a single frame is shot. The results are images rich in colour and are highly theatrical, with a slight melancholy to them, placed somewhere between a 19th century painting and a scene from a film.

“A photograph, for me, is an extract from a one-hour film of which you only see half a second,” he told Monaco Life. “I want people to feel like they’ve walked into a cinema, seen an image, and closed the door, and then have to imagine what came before and after. You play more with what’s hidden and unsaid than with actual clues. The whole story is the one that the viewer constructs in their own head.”

Ten days to build a submarine

One of the key works in the show is ‘Le Tombeau des Sirènes – The Tomb of the Sirens’, part of a series called ‘La Chute des Empires – The Fall of Empires’. Each image in the series is set in the period between 1870 and 1914, a world in the midst of change and beginning to fracture. This piece depicts a stranded submarine entangled in a reinterpretation of ancient sailor and siren mythology.

It took ten days to build the submarine out of polystyrene at a friend’s studio in Paris, Zazou Studio, in the 20th arrondissement, where it still hangs today.

The shoot itself lasted a single day. Friends, non-models and Le Turk himself all ended up in the frame. In fact, one of his make-up artists played the sailor with the rubber ring because, as Le Turk puts it, “he had a real period sailor’s face.” Le Turk can be spotted at the top of the submarine, apparently sleeping off a whisky.

Up close, one can still see the wires holding up the cardboard seagulls, which is entirely intentional. “I like this image because it looks grand and romantic, but when you get close, you see the artifice. For me it sits right between the real and the fake, the comic and the tragic.”

Throughout his work, women feature heavily with varied identities and no interest in social media ideals of beauty. Meanwhile, male figures tend to appear as sad clowns or lost sailors, their vulnerability on full display.

Burlesque is on show now at the Quai des Artistes in Monaco and until April 11th.

Stay updated with Monaco Life: sign up for our free newsletter, catch our podcast on Spotify, and follow us across Facebook,  Instagram, LinkedIn, and Tik Tok.

All photos provided. More photos can be found in the photo gallery below…