|
C/L: Could you please give us a quick overview of your work until today? S.L: I started-what I can now consider as a career when I joined the last year of Les Arts Décoratifs de Paris in the photography section, which is not a theoretical year but more of a practical one in order to make a project for the diploma. During this year at school, I was asked to make the end-of-the-year project in an estate called “La Grande Borne”, in the 91st district of Paris. When I first got there I realised I had no idea how to start a project and how to write about it, so I started to read about the architect that built the place, which marked how I would later proceed to work on any project. I wanted to come and observe how the inhabitants would live in their flats. This is how my first project started. I would photograph the flats always from the same point of view, a bit like in a theater, it was always the same scene in every apartment. This is how the series La Grande Borne was born. This project got noticed and quickly published. I loved working with the inhabitants and having this sociological approach as well as studying uphill the impact the layouts of people’s interiors can have on one’s life. La Grande Borne converged to a following project called Les Francais à Table, now called La table de l’Ordinaire. After 15 years, I started to go round in circles and I found myself in a bit of a crisis. I had the urge to diversify my work, which led me to seeking help by doing training to realise what I was doing and what I wanted to make. In 2018, I had the chance to do a residence in Villa Medici for a month. There, my aim was to free myself of my shackles. I started acting like a student again. I would leave Roma everyday with my camera and walk in the footsteps of the cineast Passolini, which was an excuse to try street photography. That’s when I realized I really wanted to work with teamsters to portray their everyday life in circumscribed spaces. I started taking pictures in the parking lots. It was still a way for me to photograph people in their intimate space of life, but with me outside. I had to get a certain (physical) distance when doing these projects. Then, I asked myself: what do I really want to nourish my work with? What direction am I aiming to go? That’s when I realized I’ve always wanted to work on campings and this is how my project Immobile Home started. I kept that project for myself for two years and then received the first prize for Les Femmes S’exposent, which gave me confidence again. I later started the series Hyper Life (2021), with a small case, a hand-held 50 mm camera and I got very good feedback, which led me to my last project Somme Toute (2022). For the first time ever I dared to shoot in a city and tell the stories of its people as its whole, which I still find very intimidating.
C/L: How did you come up with the concept of the series La Table de l’Ordinaire? (featured in our previous monthly favorites issue)
S.L: When I first had the idea of making this project, I was living in a small studio in Paris. One evening, as I was eating pasta in my bed while watching a dumb romcom on TV, I caught this vision of myself, as if my soul left my body that allowed me to see me from an outside point of view. I associated this situation with a negative judgment of myself; I felt pathetic for being alone, without a boyfriend, eating pasta in my bed and not even on a table. I started asking myself some questions… Why am I eating in bed? Because I have no table. Why do I have no table? Because I don’t have the space to have one in my twenty meters square parisian flat. One thing leading to another, I’ve come to realize that the way I was having dinner had a direct correlation with the space I had at my disposal. It was funny to realize that because I come from the South West of France, where food has always been very important for my family. I then started to ask my friends around me how they had dinner. As one of them described to me what his dinners looked like, he comforted me in the idea that I absolutely had to make a project about this. This is what he told me; “For me it’s easy, in the evening, I’m standing, leaning against my fridge, I turn my radio on and every single night it is the same ritual. I eat kiri (spread cheese) toast”. I thought that he was even weirder than me, so I asked him why he would have dinner that way. Later on, after really considering my question, he got back to me to explain that when he was younger, his mother used to work in a hospital during the night, so when he would come back from school a tray of food was waiting for him in the fridge, that he would eat alone, every night. Since then, having dinner is synonymous with solitude, coldness and anguish. I came to the conclusion that surely everyone has interesting and intimate stories explaining how they would choose to experience that moment of the day.
C/L: How did you choose and approach the people that you worked with?
S.L: That was the hardest part, which is why it took me three years to complete this project. When I first had the idea to start La Table de l’Ordinaire, I emailed the contacts I had, because at that time we didn’t have social media to expose our ideas to try and recruit some people. I found myself being immediately confronted with the difficulty of finding families. Not so because I didn't have enough contacts to reach out to, but because people would just say no. They didn’t want to be photographed. To explain how I finally found the families, I have to go back in time to provide context. When I did my end-of-the-year graduate project La Grande Borne, we had been commissioned by “la caisse des dépôts et de consignations”, which is a french bank. They would use our project to make a book about a part of the estate’s demolition in order to make it more accessible and contact us again in a few years to take new pictures of the estate, to show its changes and updates. When they reached back, I told them I wouldn’t see the point of taking pictures of the exact same flats again as the work they did in the estate during those years wouldn't be shown through the photos. However I suggested taking pictures of people eating. They didn’t say no. I was thus mandated, I approached the trade union of the guardians of the estate, I talked to each guardian at the door of the buildings and being mandated, the guardians had to help me in my work. Often, they would agree to be photographed and following that, we were able to do peer-to-peer. Thus, the project Les Français A Table, later renamed La Table de l’Ordinaire began in La Grande Borne, again.
C/L: How were you impacted by entering so many different people’s spaces and intimacy?
S.L: Well to start with, I always have a lot of empathy for the people that I meet because, when I go to someone’s home, when I go up to someone in a parking lot, I am aware that they’re already giving me such a gift in allowing me to take a picture of them and signing off this little document allowing me to do whatever I want with their image.
I publish quite a bit so, sometimes, strangers who become my subjects see themselves the next day on the cover of LIBÉ for example. I really need to be very clear with them about the possible uses of these images. I experience very beautiful and striking moments at times. Imagine, I’ve been doing this for 20-25 years! I’ve seen some dramatic situations, I’ve seen situations I chose not to share because I realise that the families don’t understand what they’re giving me. Actually what I find fascinating is the stories that people tell me. I couldn’t even invent them. I think that doing this exploration like I do of the ordinary, of life in the daily, it’s something broken.
C/L: What stories impacted you the most?
S.L: It was on the project Somme Toute, this sir who I would often run into in the streets of Flixecourt. He’s quite small, quite fragile, paper thin. Even if he looks rickety and in pain, he’s everywhere. I see him at church, I see him at the polling station, at the supermarket. Anyways, I ran into him so much in the end I decided to introduce myself. In the end I started talking to him about my project which he accepted to participate in. He had had a difficult upbringing and was very poor. Since he was so fragile, he couldn’t do his job anymore, which used to be road-man. Now, he swept the city, most of his life he swept. When I started taking his picture he was eating oysters and was explaining to me that he had just gotten himself a special treat: “10,52 euros the basket. They also give the lemon along with it”, and that really touched me. Under the picture it says that he would love for Mr. Macron to come see him just to realise what it’s like to live with a handicap pension. He would receive him very nicely and they would have a chat.
C/L: Did you notice a change in people’s attitude once they noticed your camera?
S.L: The project where that was the most striking was La Table de l’Ordinaire. You have to imagine the situation: I meet families, they tell me they eat at 8pm, so I get to their home at 7pm. Then, I pick my frame, which is what really makes the picture, I put my lights up and then the game becomes to not speak during the entire meal, become invisible. Some meals would go by very quickly and in 15mins it would be over. Sometimes there were meals which lasted hours where I would just be stuck behind my camera, folded in the bottom of a wardrobe. Even if I tried making myself as small as possible, I was still there. It’s not natural to have someone taking pictures of you as you eat. Therefore, the first pictures I took were always useless. The most difficult part was with the children. If they would put their fingers in their noses and saw a flash, Pouf, they would keep on doing it again to see if there would be another one. I had to take maybe around 30 pictures to lose them, not making it clear what I was looking for.
If you look at the final pictures you can see that in most of them the plates are empty because it’s only at the end of the meals that people are fully relaxed.
C/L: With your picture descriptions being so short, how do you manage to select what information to put forward?
S.L: I would say that they are more so stories than descriptions. I try to write in a way which makes it unclear as to who is speaking. I think that allows us to put some distance with any possible judgment. When I meet the people I work with I always have my phone, a pen and a notebook around my neck with the authorisations in my backpack. I write down everything they tell me about themselves by hand and it usually ends up being about both sides of a page. When I have an image which I find very strong, I think that my text shouldn’t be a response to the photograph but should act more as a slap.
C/L: What advice would you give to art students who are currently struggling with finding their “style”?
S.L: Everyone is different in the end so there is no strict recipe. When it comes to the world of photography, we’re lucky that there are many competitions, bursaries and festivals…I really think everyone should go. Also I just think that what’s most important is just to do, to always create. Once you start to see redundancy, a repeated red thread in your work, that’s where you can start to develop. I also think it’s super important to trust yourself. When you quickly tell someone your concept, it can be hard for them to see through your execution. If they don’t like the idea it’s not necessarily that it’s not good, just that they don’t have your vision. For example, I think I myself lost too much time waiting for approbation from my friends, people I trusted when all I needed was to trust myself.
|
