Now 86 years old, Gilbert Garcin used to be the owner of a lamp manufacturing company in Marseille, France. Following a workshop during a festival of cinema, video, plastic arts and multimedia called the Rencontres Internationales in Arles, he gave his life a profound change.

At the tender age of 65, Garcin decided to give up his life’s business and set off on a new adventure – his photographic career. His style is playful, evokeful, pensive, completely surrealist and undeniably original. In his photographs, Garcin poses as an ordinary ‘Mr. Everybody,’ dressed in an old overcoat. “By placing himself, via the character he embodies, in absurd and inextricable situations, he invites us to ponder such philosophical quandaries as time, solitude and the weight of existence”, says Monovisions Magazine. His work displays nuances and commentaries on the human condition that can only be the work of someone who has internally led a full, deeply pensive and emotional life.

Astoundingly, nothing is photoshopped. Garcin simply cuts and pastes to produce his out of scale images; cutting out his self portrait and positioning it in a handmade set, reshooting the picture, and voila. It’s theatrical. He balances humor and gravity just like the tightropes he walks in his photographs. He makes us debate the transient nature of our existence and the tenacity one needs to keep going,

Let Garcin be a reminder to all of us that you’re never too old, and it is never to late to start creating, making, seeking, exploring.