Working independently allows him to preserve his handicraft approach. He has chosen to concentrate his activity on Cibachrome only, and the demand is so strong that he could not satisfy the photographer's longing for other services. He has thus become a specialist; his thirty years of experience with Cibachrome, his knowledge and expertise of the process have made him an exceptional printer. And what's more, he fiercely loves Cibachrome, which still fascinates and surprises him with all the possibilities it offers.

Roland Dufau's workshop is in the Quartier de L'Odeon in Paris. Old cameras and soberly framed prints on easels in the boutique's window remind visitors of antique or book shops, common in this part of Paris. Strangely enough, this is the decoration chosen by the awner as the sign-board for the most modern of colour processes.

Cibachrome offers the same possibilities to the artist as to the photographer who needs series of industrial prints or who creates synthetical images. This flexibility, together with its technical qualities, its pure and highly stable azo dyes, its colour saturation and the extreme definition of their restitution, make Cibachrome particularly fascinating and highly suitable for collector's prints. A stamped print by Roland Dufau is of steady value to collectors and museum conservators.

Roland Dufau opened his shop in 1980. His many collaborations with famous photographers, his extreme sympathy, the time he dedicates to dialogue with photographers and his great generosity, in particular towards young people, have made him famous.

Roland dufau is now internationally renowned and has more than five hundred regular customers in such various fields as plastic arts, fashion, advertising, press, architecture and wildlife photography.

Furthermore, it is the close relationship between the craftsman and the process, the complicity between the printer and the photographer that make Roland Dufau's singularity. The photographic image, perhaps more than any other, holds a strong affective charge evident to the photographer, but also to the printer who thrives to render on paper the creator's imaginary. It is therefore easy to understand the complicity between these two actors.

This relationship comes from the understanding of the photographer's expression and from its extension to the tangibility of the print. With slight touches of light, filters and masks under the enlarger, Roland Dufau sculpts the matter of Cibachrome. The succession of trials and test prints restitutes the photographer's creation in the final print, as if they were converging eyesights.

This is what this exhibition Roland Dufau, sculptor of light. A passion for Cibachrome, is about. It consists of the works of forty photographers, chosen by Roland Dufau. It is a double homage; that of the Man in the lab to the photographer: an admiring form, and that of the Author to the printer: a friendly connivance. Nowadays, many photographers associate the name of the printer to their pictures. This exhibition by Roland Dufau intends to give a grateful form to this recent move.

Dominique Gaessler September 1990