C. Balland

Artist description

In the photo, one can guess the curious eye, the well-groomed mustache, and the gaze of an aging man. His name is Camille Balland, a talented artist firmly attached to his native land, the Borinage and Courcelles, sites that for years were an important mining area producing coal.
Practicing what was then defined as "social art", Camille Balland specialized in the representation and very personal interpretation of the faces of his contemporaries, those miners he considered as brothers, both humble and courageous.
For a long time, he was an industrial photographer, specializing in large portraits drawn in pencil and charcoal. To do this, he had his own laboratory, at a time when photos were taken on glass plates that could be retouched to improve their quality, representing landscapes of the "black country" as well as the faces of miners whose laborious work, sweat on their foreheads, and perhaps the fear of their daily lives were evident.

Camille Balland lived with his mother and one of his brothers who had an intellectual disability but possessed an excellent visual memory, allowing him to methodically classify all the photos of his artist brother.
Firmly attached to his Borinage, which he only left during the Great War (I would specify which war) by taking refuge in France, he also proved to be a talented artist there by making numerous busts and other bas-reliefs in clay, whose bronzes were subsequently cast in a Brussels foundry, constituting yet another tribute to these miners whose pride he shared upon their return after enduring so many hours of suffering.