Fabien Montique's Dreamlike Portraits on the Beaches of Dakar
The Paris-based photographer opens up about the making of his new photo series and reconnecting with the joys of childhood.
It’s 11 o'clock on a Monday morning, and Fabien Montique hasn’t slept. “I'm very tired right now,” he says with an exhausted laugh over Zoom from his Paris apartment. The Barbados-born photographer has been up all night editing images for a brand campaign. No stranger to sleep deprivation, Montique is as wildly creative as he is unreservedly hard-working. Whether creating visuals for music artists like Pusha T and 2 Chainz or storied fashion houses like Louis Vuitton and Givenchy, his work never fails to be intriguingly beautiful—often cleverly playing with the boundaries of fantasy and reality, and always engaging with the act of “play” itself. “You have days when you're tired, but I'm happy to be in the position that I’m in,’” he says. “Being able to create is such a luxury. I have an idea and then I shoot it. That’s so powerful.”
Living in Paris for over a decade now, Montique’s career began thousands of miles away in New York, where he got his start by informally taking pictures of family, friends and acquaintances. It was one portrait though, of model Jasmine Sanders, that would catapult him on a new trajectory after it landed in front of Kanye West. “You know how he does,” Montique says. “He messaged me and was like, ‘Hey, I want you to shoot something for me.’ I shot that, and then he was like, ‘Okay, I'm gonna be the first artist to have an in-house photographer. You’re gonna shoot everything for me.’ And then I did it for all the artists on his label.” Through West, Montique later formed a close relationship with Virgil Abloh, shooting fantasy-infused imagery for the designer from the early days of Off-White through to the heights of its global success. “Off-White was like Virgil’s baby, and he trusted me so much,” he remembers. “He always wanted to give opportunities to young creatives to work at the highest level. We had some really special moments. I miss him.”
Of the countless projects Montique has shot over the years, his latest, he says, is perhaps his favorite of all. It presents a sun-soaked love letter to Senegal, which the artist brought to life over four whirlwind days in April. Capturing Senegalese models and members of the local community in Dakar—“friends and friends of friends”—amid the sublime coastal beauty of the region, the photographs lay somewhere between fashion imagery and something more rooted in reality. Mixing vividly hued formalwear courtesy of Givenchy with unstyled looks of people just as they are, in their own clothes, the series depicts joyful scenes of football on the beach, motorbike rides and games like jump rope, marbles and hopscotch. “The series explores the universal language of childhood games and the innocence and joy they evoke,” Montique explains of the series’ rich, cinematic images. “I think it’s my best work so far.”
The idea for the project naturally took form over the course of a year. “I say in life, I'm an energy person: I’m all about vibes,” Montique explains. “The reason I chose Senegal is because of the energy [of the people]. Every set that I'm on, there's somebody from Senegal: the model, the hair or the makeup artist. I was like, ‘Okay, I have to go.’” So, after consulting with Senegalese friend and model Malick Bodian about the idea, who put him in touch with Dakar-based production house Oxygen, Montique hastily secured looks from Givenchy days before flying out for the trip. “The clothing happened at the last minute,” he says. “I started to panic because in my mind I was like, ‘I'm not gonna have any clothes.’ I messaged Matthew [Williams], and he really came through for me. Thank you sir. I owe you!”
Though the image-maker was only in the country for a fleeting 90 hours, he describes the trip as a “beautiful experience" where he was approached with openness and warmth by everyone he met. “My mind was blown when I arrived in Senegal,“ he says. “I had never seen something so vibrant, so alive, so human. Here in Europe, we walk past each other, we don't say ‘hi,’ but there is just this love there, this pride.” This was epitomized in the casting process, which Montique describes as taking on a life of its own, with each person happily introducing him to their friends and so on. “It was very organic,” he says. “You would go to the beach, there'd be the guy there selling his things, you’d ask him a question and then he would tell you, ‘Come with me.’ You go through the village and he introduces you to his entire family. It’s so open. It reminded me of being a kid.”
Shot on white sand beaches and in pink salt lakes, Montique’s staged scenes capture this sense of connection despite their fictitious setups. “I'll give you one little situation,” he continues. “Everything was staged, as that's my approach of ‘playing with reality.' On one of the shoots we were on the beach, and one of the models had sand on her hands and on her knees. The models didn’t know each other, but one girl went up to the other and started to dust the sand off her and out of her hair. I hadn't seen something like that in so long, something so genuine. My biggest takeaway from the experience was like, ‘Wow, this is just real love.’”
Though it might sound counterintuitive, Montique’s aim when blending reality and fantasy in his work is to make space for authentic human feeling to show up. “I want to capture that moment when everybody lets their guard down,” he explains. “The joy, the fear; whatever the person is feeling at that particular point. One of my favorite photographers Richard Avedon said the hardest thing to do is to shoot against a white backdrop, but if people have something to interact with, they can let go.” For Montique, this might mean introducing things that don’t naturally belong in a given environment, such as bringing a forest into a building or setting up a semi-surreal scene and seeing what ensues. It’s one of the reasons he loves getting adults to play games. “I’ve done hula hoops for Vogue Italia. I’ve had models on a full fashion set on the ground playing marbles,” he says. “I just set the stage and let it unfold. They let go when they get into that vibe, and you capture something that's real.”
This series in Senegal is one of Montique’s most accomplished examples of what can happen in this space between fact and fiction, and moreover, of the liberating potential of playing games—a carefree state of being we often forget how to access when we grow up. Beyond making beautiful pictures, Montique says the project was also about personally reconnecting to childhood memories of his youth in Barbados and the universal formative experiences of curiosity and adventure. “I think the older I get, the more I’m seeking out what it felt like to be a kid,” he says. “I grew up on the beach, not a sandy beach like in Senegal but a rocky one. It's kind of about me getting back to that person that I was when I was young. He's been lost for some time, trying to make it in the world, but I'm really trying to show that in my work; that ease of life, that joy.”
Looking back at the project as a whole, Montique says the trip to Senegal offered not only an opportunity to meet new people and connect to the beauty of a new place, but also a chance to tap into the core of what drives him as an artist. “With the images I create, I’m basically trying to learn something,” he explains. “I'm trying to experience something, whether that's something I've seen in my reality, my friends, or things that I dream about. To sum it all up, this series is about dreams and also about being you and letting go sometimes. It can be just a second, and sometimes it's very fleeting, but if you can capture a moment of pure joy, it lives forever. I've done a lot of shoots for a lot of big magazines and a lot of huge productions. Here I didn't have as much support, but I love these images so much more because they're genuine.”