Eloïse Labarbe-Lafon
FRANCE
Fisheye x InCadaqués Women Photography Award 2023
Eloïse Labarbe-Lafon, a 28-year-old visual artist specializing in photography, discovered her passion for photography and traditional silver processes during her formative years. Alongside her dedicated engagement with photography, she pursued studies in art history and cinema, even immersing herself in the restoration of films and colorization of documentary archives. These immersive experiences, tied to the realm of early cinema and the nostalgia preserved in film, profoundly influence her artistic approach.
Eloïse's creative journey revolves around the fusion of photography and painting, where she masterfully reimagines reality. Her gaze gives rise to intimate realms that border on the fantastical. Central to her work is the notion of the image-object's significance. She meticulously captures fleeting moments on black and white silver film, infusing them with vibrant hues through her skilled hand-coloring technique. Using brushes and the tactile essence of her fingers, she imparts a unique preciousness to each image.
• SERIES •
Ghosts
« Ghosts » is a collection of memories captured on black and white film and hand-colored. The paint applied with a brush, but also with a finger, leaves imperfections, smudges and imprints. The mixing of mediums produces a disruption and provokes the passage from multiple images to unique work.
The real captured by the lens becomes fiction through a colorization with dreamlike tones. The bodies and landscapes offer themselves to the lens, strolling in spaces of solitude and silence. Imbued with a nostalgic atmosphere, similar to fables of yesteryear, the preciousness of the images reveals ghostly characters with lonely pouts evolving in a sensual chromatic universe. These pictorial mirages are made like stories questioning the strange and the equivocal. Frozen in a temporality nostalgic temporality, the protagonists appear lascivious, distant and inaccessible, in a chimerical space. They are like caught in a tale of which we know neither the beginning nor the end.
