FRENCH President François Hollande never thought he would have to climb up all the way to the top of an old building in Paris just to get one photo out of a one-hour shoot.

    And he probably didn’t expect that in the presence of his two bodyguards, he would be cuddled and at times, was ordered to pose as told.

    But that’s how it went when he accepted the invitation to have his photo taken by French photographer Olivier Roller, under whose project “Figure of Power,” the president is only François représentant” (Representative François).

    The project, which features dozens of important figures, including politicians, financiers, media moguls and diplomats, confronts the audience with the question of what is power and how one thinks about it.

    Roller said that no matter how people adore and praise power, he himself always tries to play it down.

    “The problem with these people is they are too powerful, that people around them are so ‘simpatique’ with them, saying beautiful things to them. But what they say is not always real, even if you’re an important person,” he said.

    “I have to see them nude — intellectually, if I want to make a good picture, so I always work my way to do it.”

    Roller often requires his subjects to put down all their electronics; he gives incessant orders, and becomes abruptly silent or makes a silly joke out of the blue — giving them no time to think, but to “focus on what’s happening right here and right now,” he said.

    In return, Roller he himself also focuses on the person sitting across from him so attentively that he feels exhausted after every photo session.

    “It’s like a guy who runs 100 meters in 10 seconds. As a photographer I do the same thing, you try to get what they have inside of them in 10 seconds.”

    Roller once described his job as “besieging a fortress and finally conquering it.”

    Now, his power project is stretching to China, where he made stunning profiles of the Terracotta Warriors.

    In “The Tears of the Earth,” his new exhibition now in Beijing and later in Changsha, Roller compares the two world powers from over 2,000 ago, the Roman Empire ( 27 B.C.-A.D. 395) and the Qin Dynasty (221-207 B.C.).

    “Imagine during that time, there are only two muscles in the world, and they don’t communicate, and now I make them communicate in this exhibition. It’s cool,” Roller said.

    He spent hours alone in the museum with the statues, adjusting lights and trying all possible angles.

    “You know if you move one centimeter, the shadow is not the same and the face is not the same,” Roller said. Adding that he finally managed to get a few satisfying pictures of the two warriors — from over 200 photos out of the day’s 10-hour shoot.

    Roller said that the experience reinforced the idea of how we should deal with our faces and our skin, as time leaves marks on them. “You know people usually find these pictures of the statues amazing, with the stains or the scars. So if you like this kind of picture, you should also love the marks on your skin; you should know that curves are also beautiful.”

    (China Daily)