Jean-Louis Schoellkopf is a photographer, Not architecture photographer.
To architectural objects, to singular works, he prefers the city, the out of hand, the off-camera, the fullness of the pathetic of life, work and the terraces of the cafés,
joy and hortensias, sadness and ill-arranged chairs.
His works do not come from a sight on such or such feat but much more from a kind look at beings, theirs lives, their worlds; the volontary point of view of a full artist
- A way of being among them.
Concerned first of all, Schoellkopf is never a passer-by, like in Plourin-lès-Morlaix.
In this Finisterian town that a quiet half-day is enough to visit,in development since thirteenyears (1991-2003), where one comes back to the center whichever lane one takes,
he stays three weeks, three times one week, in different seasons, for the sky, the ground, trees and walls that make architecture, and cars.
And the people, always, all these "Jean de Plourin".
Finally, in turn they come to him, want to know what this stranger in working blue suit and camera wants of them.
Today, he is with them, among the ones he follows up to the living-room of their family hooses, in this intimity of popular classes.
Doing this, he reveals that the so often evoked gap between popular and architectural culture does not exist here.
They are as much owners of the contemporary architecture -"without roof" as they say - in the heart  of Plourin than of their house, with the same justified proudness.
Schoellkopf does not expose their things but the space between them and the things and the richness of the world there and the other side around the corner.
He shows what we knew but that, because of editorial musts, very few architects and architecture photographers resolve to show: to show a building placed in harmony or
ignorance to context, nothing is better than photographing elsewhere to the horizon.
Then only, the truth of the place is given, and its internal expanse, its ability to include the different, the elsewhere.
No esthetism, Schoellkopf takes the almost nothings, follows charms and chances, put them together, adds them and reveals all of a sudden, in a so grave and small gift,
that the sum of the almost-nothings makes an unique totality.
He makes the people present, alone or in groups, and places where their life facts happen, remembrance and details, that is the sacred in the everyday.
When showing this, he says what founds the being-together, our being-together: the political.



Philippe Madec