He didn’t approach sports photography through a traditional path, but thanks to his passion and rediscovered interest in sports he found in the lights of Cape Town. During the post-Covid hush he taught himself the camera as he once taught himself rhythm.

From imagined campaigns to real work, as a lifelong mover, he captures sporting expression  and trims the noise to leave only strength, power, pain, smoothness. His images live where fashion’s control meets sport’s truth: reinventing the frame, taking action out of context to reach its essence. 

Basile talked with us about his France background and African experience, music influence, being an active kid, and how all of this led him to express his sport interpretation through photography, where action slips its context and only the essential remains.

New places, new inspirations

“Photography for me It’s actually a pretty recent story because I only started after Covid, I was living in South Africa, in Cape Town and that’s where it all started. It’s a city where you’re outside all the time. That sparkled in me the will to start photographing this new landscape surrounding me. There’s a mountain right in the middle of the city. There are waves. You can go surfing right before work. You can go for a hike right after work. It’s always hiking, running — which is what I do — surfing and different outdoor sports. It was like another world over there than what I’m obviously living now in Paris. It’s a place where you feel you have time to accomplish things. There are tons of creative people — tons of musicians, tons of photographers.

When Covid hit, I was working in tourism. So there were no more tourists. I had lots of time. I did the lockdown there, living with friends. One of my friends was a photographer from Chicago and I was producing music for years. To me, images and music always went very well together telling a story. So we made a rap clip — he was the guy rapping and I made the beats and I was making the images. At the same time, I was learning video, and hence, by my music, I was learning photography too. After that day I thought that maybe I could enjoy doing this for a living, that I wanted to do this.”

Fake it until you make it

“I ended up creating fake ads for different brands related to running or trail running mixing sports and fashion as it would have been inside my mind. Eventually I got back to France and continued making these works with some of my friends until people wanted to hire me for real campaigns. It was a “fake it until you make it” state of mind. But it worked out and after some months, one of the earliest jobs I got was for Oakley sunglasses. 

The Parisian sports community is actually pretty reduced, and from then it was like a little bubble that popped. Once you get in, everybody hears about you, and then it radiates.

Basically, this is how it started: fake ads in Cape Town with beautiful light and background, cause you don’t need much to make an image beautiful there, and then coming back to France and doing stuff on my own until someone really wanted it.”

Growing up inside sport

“I grew up in Lyon and I did sports my whole life. From  horse riding when I was a kid, or running now, I did like five or six different martial arts, climbing, and volleyball. It’s always been part of my life, but I haven’t had one big sport that followed me all along.

Probably, the biggest one was gymnastics when I was a teenager. We even went to French championship competitions, but I was just 15. This, to me, was the biggest sports experience because we’re in a group, with different disciplines within one sport. Being an active kid — and now an active adult — definitely had an impact on how I shoot sport. If you know what people do and what people can do, then you know what is exceptional. If there’s a side move, a special style — anything that stands out from what you regularly see — of course you notice it. Maybe that’s the moment you take the picture. If you don’t know the sport, you might miss these insider moments.

Recently I’ve been shooting golf, which I didn’t know anything about. I kept asking questions because I have to understand what I’m looking at. I initially thought golf was a bit boring, you know. But the more I learnt, the more I realized: what the hell is this? It’s like darts and baseball at the same time. It has style and consistency, and you can be very good, but if you’re mid one time, you’re absolutely not part of the best. It’s difficult to know every sport — but the more you dive in, the richer it gets. Understanding what makes a good player good is super enriching. 

There’s also a deeper level: When I’m directing or photographing athletes, if we have something to talk about — if we share some experience, even if they’re much better than me, there’s real confidence. We can give each other what’s needed if we speak the same language. It’s so important.”

Reinventing the frame

“In my photography I try to push a sports approach with a fashion sensibility. What I love about fashion is: you can invent and create a whole new universe. You create background, light, pose, attitude, clothing, looks — which is harder in sports. In sports, either you do an editorial or you capture something during the action. There are two levels for me: Capture what exists and give an account of what happens, or reinvent the reality around what exists — capture it in a frame where you don’t fully understand the surroundings. Capturing the essence without explaining everything around it.

Gymnastics usually it’s in a gym, or running usually is on a track, a stadium…That’s contextual. But you can take the practice out of context and make it totally different — make it what your dream about it is. Then you get the essence of the sport. A dream would be to shoot gymnastics not in a gym. It’s pure — strength, air, pain, elegance — and a gym is rarely elegant. But if you control light and background, you change the narrative.

Sports photography has often, until recently, been very normal, like “this is what happens.” I’m not really interested in what happens — I’m interested in what I want it to be. Maybe that’s focusing on tiny details, or changing the frame so people are a bit confused, and only the essence of movement remains. For example, I recently shot judo. The context to me was super ugly: Led boards with commercials and terrible colors around the tatami, blocking the view, tiny angles from floor level. My question was: ‘how can I not have this awful frame in my shot?’ So everything must disappear to have the purity of the movement. The images I posted are the ones that take the sport out of the arena, into a kind of theoretical world of judo — more aestheticized than reality, with lots of post-production — but that’s what I wanted to convey. Sometimes I respect reality; sometimes I want to take people further.

With that said, the essence of sports photography is not only one for me, it depends. Sometimes it’s totally aesthetic — a beautiful shot that just looks good. Maybe that’s the exercise, and it’s enough. Or it’s meaningful — the most difficult — something that sticks in people’s minds, that they can project into, identify with. A victory, a defeat, an injury — defining moments spectators and athletes can relate. But it’s hard to create actual meaning in one frame. In sport, themes are overcoming, victory, defeat, pain. In one picture you can’t evoke much more than this. So to me, a good sports photograph is strikingly accurate in one message.”

Music as sport

“I used to produce music when I was young, it was my main hobby; and I’m a video director now, so I produce sounds for my films. It’s difficult to link it directly to photography but in any case music is connected with sports for me. Is what links a sport to a memory. It might just be the music you’re listening to while experiencing it — something that motivates you or puts you down. Music is so close to emotions that it attaches to memory, and sports are part of our collective memory as human beings.

I have some of my worst and best sports memories linked to songs: when I was a kid, I was doing relay-style horse racing, and I was like 13 years old. My horse was the fiercest one; I couldn’t control it, way too powerful for me. We were doing competitions, traveling all over France. One day my horse went bat-shit crazy and escaped, all the other teams were still racing, and the public was staring at me. There was one song from a 90s French singer ‘Alizée’ and that scene could have been cinema: me chasing my horse, with that soundtrack. 

I definitely think that music is a facilitator of images. Linking music to photography and to sport makes people feel images more. Lately I’ve been running more and depending on my playlist when I run, I’ll run completely differently. I love to listen to R&B when I run because most runs have to be chilled; R&B has this space where you’re super relaxed but you can still go fast. Music gives a whole context in which your emotions choose a lane: I’ll be efficient, I’ll be the best — or — I’ll take it easy, this is an enjoyable, chilled moment.”

Sports aesthetics still need to be reinvented

“Gymnastics is the sport that I would like to approach in a more contemporary way. It’s so complete. I could do one shoot per discipline: vault, beam, floor, rings, parallel bars, high bar — each with a thousand things to do. It would be a beautiful project. There aren’t really many people who shoot it this way — it’s niche, which is why it hasn’t been exploited. I really wish I could do it sometime soon.

Another discipline I’d like to dig into is actually another way of working with a camera: in the water — surfing, and also wildlife. There’s a bridge to make within that world. Taking pictures in the water is such a difficult exercise — very peculiar — and super interesting to explore. My vision of pictures is not factual; it’s more fantasized, imaginative. With the distortion of water you can show without showing. It’s another element I would like to learn and enjoy.

Maybe these are my two sides: the Paris side that likes fashion — strict, gritty, beautiful imagery; and the Cape Town side — nature, softness, dream, abstraction. Two aesthetics I enjoy; two disciplines — gymnastics and water sports— that fit them perfectly.

The question I always ask myself nowadays is: what’s next? How to do better, bigger. The aim is to take time to do exactly what I’d like: a bridge between fashion aesthetics and sport — whether in photography or video. It needs pre-work, and to make it happen you need time, the right people, the right setting — not easy to come by. Within sports, it’s hard to say which one, but if I can extract poetry out of a sport that isn’t obviously poetic — if I can bring that kind of sensibility to disciplines that don’t usually receive it — that’s a win. And if you plug that sensibility into a concept and a setting that has nothing to do with the initial sport — then that’s a banger.”