A better way to visit Yes Photographies: the site keeps evolving

Hello everyone,

For nearly a year, I have been working as much on organising my photographs as on continuing to make them.

Over the years, Yes Photographies has become an immense archive. The real challenge was no longer just publishing new images, but finding how to let you discover them without getting lost in their number.

I have gradually built the site around three ways of visiting, depending on your mood of the moment and how curious you feel.

Visiting Yes Photographies

The Public Collection: to discover

The Public Collection brings together nearly 300 photographs, free to registered members of the site.

I imagined it as a first door into my world. Like a museum room, it lets you move through a selection organised by major themes, which already give a glimpse of the much vaster worlds that patrons then find in the Reserve.

I have also developed the Figures Game there:

another way of moving through the images, this time leaving a share to chance. You draw one photograph, then another, without really knowing which one you will land on. I love this more playful and poetic way of visiting a collection: sometimes an image you would never have looked for yourself becomes precisely the one that stops you.

Temporary exhibitions: to come back regularly

I also wanted to offer something more alive than a simple chronological archive of my sessions.

The Temporary Exhibitions have become this second way of visiting Yes Photographies.

Each week, I generally compose a small exhibition of around sixty photographs around a theme, a mood or a story. It might be a couple in Venice, the world of fairies, the vibrations of autumn, fantasy, fine art, a metamorphosis or a new session at the studio.

The exhibitions alternate between four main editorial lines:

• Visual Narratives — fictions, metamorphoses, characters and stagings.

• Free Women — the body as form, presence and language.

• Embodied Intimacies — a closer exploration of sensuality and desire.

• What’s New in the Studio — to discover more recent work and follow the evolution of my sessions.

These exhibitions are aimed especially at those who visit the site now and then, or regularly, without necessarily wanting to explore thousands of images straight away.

An email accompanies each new exhibition with the week’s theme and direct links to visit it.

The Reserve: to really enter the archive

And then there is the Reserve. It is meant for patrons, for the most loyal visitors and for those who wish to discover my work much more widely.

Their support lets me, very concretely, keep up this foundational work: organising shoots, producing, retouching, archiving and constantly publishing new photographs.

The Reserve is organised into large worlds:

• Modern and Future,

• Emotions and Connections,

• Echo of the Past,

• Myths and Legends,

• Body and Essence,

• Eroticism and Sensuality,

• 4K Galleries,

• Archives,

• Studio Immersions, the new and immense gallery that lets you go much more deeply into the sessions and discover hundreds of their images.

Patrons of course also have access to all the temporary exhibitions.

But as the Reserve grew, a new question became unavoidable:

how do you make visiting tens of thousands of photographs enjoyable?

So I gradually developed several tools.

Galleries in batches of 100 images

Opening a gallery of 1,500 photographs straight away is unpleasant, for the visitor and for their browser alike.

Large galleries are now cut into more digestible sets:

1 to 100, 101 to 200, 201 to 300…

You can thus move forward gradually through a series without loading thousands of images at once.

Your personal collection

During your visit, some photographs touch you more than others.

You can now add them to your personal collection.

This selection is tied to your account and goes with you across your visits. You can then find it from the Reserve menu, revisit your favourite images, remove some and gradually evolve your own selection. I really like this idea: in the midst of my photographic archive, everyone can gradually build their own Yes Photographies.

A ‘Surprise Me’ function

When you have thousands of images and dozens of galleries, choosing can sometimes become the problem. So I have also developed a Surprise Me function, which simply lets the site take you somewhere else. Another way of exploring: stop searching, and accept coming across something you might never have opened of your own accord.

The new ‘What’s New’ page

One major problem remained, though. I regularly publish new images in many galleries, but notifying you of every update had become extremely time-consuming.

And above all, it was almost impossible for a patron to know quickly:

What has changed since my last visit?

After quite a long stretch of development work, this feature finally exists.

In the Reserve menu, you will now find a What’s New page.

It automatically gathers the latest batches of images published.

Each time I add to a gallery, the site now automatically records:

• the gallery concerned;

• the number of new photographs added;

• an image from the new addition;

• the date;

• and a direct link to go and discover them.

There is therefore no longer any need to go through the whole Reserve to find out what has just changed.

It is probably one of the improvements I am happiest about, because it finally makes visible the truly living character of the archive.

And soon: your visit history

I am now working on a new step: Visit History.

The idea is very simple: when a patron returns to the site, their account will be able to remember their route, even if they change device or browser.

In time, this will notably make it possible to find:

• Resume My Visit - To go straight back to the gallery or batch of images you were exploring.

• Already Visited - To identify the galleries you have already been through.

• To Discover - To gradually bring up places in the Reserve you have never yet explored.

I don’t want to turn the visit into a race for percentages or a statistics table. The aim is exactly the opposite: to help you find your bearings amid abundance without ever losing the pleasure of wandering.

All these developments ultimately start from the same question: how do you make an immense archive into something other than an accumulation of images? How do you allow people to discover, to come back, to get lost, to find again what they love and to keep being surprised?

I put enormous passion into the evolution of Yes Photographies, in the images as much as in how I help you discover them. And I particularly thank the patrons who make this long-haul work possible. You are truly the pillars of this adventure.

Happy new season to you all,

Yohann