Fantômes

Eloïse Labarbe-Lafon is a french photographer and painter based in Paris. She started photography around the age of 15. In parallel with her photographic practice, she studied art history and experimental cinema, worked as a film restorer, archivist and film colorist. This proximity to the archives, the cinema of the origins, the memories printed on film, have undeniably nourished Eloïse's art. She also experiments with video, through the use of Super 8 film and analog colorizing process.

« Fantômes » is a collection of moments captured on black and white film, then hand colored. The paint applied with cotton and fingers reveals imperfections, smudges and fingerprints. The mixing of mediums generates texture, transitioning from the photographic concept of multiple image to the unique « image-object » artwork.

« Fantômes » gathers daily moments, travels, scenes of intimacy and phantasmagoric stagings .The reality captured by the lens becomes fiction through colorization and the use of dreamlike tones. Bodies and landscapes surrender to the lens, strolling through spaces of solitude and silence. Imbued with a nostalgic feel, like ancient fables, the images’ preciousness reveals characters with lonely pouts, evolving in a sensual chromatic universe. These pictural mirages transform into stories that question the strange and the ambiguous. Frozen in a nostalgic temporality, the protagonists seem lascivious, distant and inaccessible, in a chimerical space. They seem caught up in a tale of which we know neither the beginning nor the end.