Laurence Leblanc, France

Can All Dreams be Found Somewhere Else?

Laurence Leblanc silently follows her own solitary artistic path in the field of contemporary creative photography. Nurtured by a deep knowledge of photography and the understanding of its history, she deliberately avoids scattering away her curiosity from topics of interest, broadening instead her approach in the production of her images. Her strongest ally is time, the one given to observe and to mature. A member of both the VU gallery and agency in Paris, she regularly publishes and exhibits her work.

From her first explorations in Cambodia to her work on "Lost objects", art critics who have written about her images, use a wide array of adjectives as they attempt without ever completely succeeding to give shape her style: dispelling, impressionistic, delicate, discreet, melancholic, vibrating, dreamlike. …Yet, if any of these qualifiers are able to somewhat define her subtle attempts and the inner turmoil her photographs provoke, they also bring confusion.

She is, in the world of photography a rare example of restraint, humility and self-control. For her, the act of taking a picture grows from gradual impregnation with the subject and his or her environment. The resulting pictures are often carefully thought-out, precise, and elaborate developments. Particularly sensitive to the violence in the world and to the chaos of destinies, she rids herself of all documentary curiosity in order to focus deeply on what is not visible: the muteness of an ancient pain, the texture of an absent look.

Commenting on portraits of hers, Cambodian filmmaker Rithy Panh wrote: "Her pictures look like souls…their fuzziness is not fuzzy, their grainy appearance is not grainy, life is not exactly life. Yet it is not death either. I like being led on this narrow territory between the two."

By tightening the flux of primary emotions and rejecting today’s urge for "hyper-speed", she concentrates on taking pictures of the traces of events, of landscapes, of faces that linger within her.

Benoît Rivero

Actes-Sud