Les Instants

Les Instants (About the book and serie)

Chrystel Mukeba collects and presents the intimate fragments of a daily life that seems to flow out of time.

One slips in and out, page after page, between the rustles and the whispers.

In the particular attention paid to the smallest details, one believes to read the desire of the photographer to exchange her eyes for those of childhood. If they sometimes appear closed, evading the gaze, or sometimes even imploring, it is these same eyes that make everything happen.

At their contact, a snail shell lodged in the palm of the hand, a reflection in the water, or simply the sun spots dancing on the wall become a source of enchantment. The poetry of the detail that is sketched in these small things has the prodigious power to revive, by soliciting our senses, emotions buried in our memory.

To seize the fragile and fleeting grace of these precious moments seems to be a quest for eternity of which photography is often the instrument.

Perhaps the act of recording betrays here precisely the fear of loss. For among the living, the mark of an absence also invites itself. The tender dedication with which the photographer opens the book suggests a recent mourning.

We watch for its unspeakable presence in the shadows cast, the veils of mist or the halos of white light. It is a sign of the irrepressible desire to fix in time the ephemeral course of the little things in life, to finally suspend time and perhaps even to dream madly of overcoming it.

Text By Marie Papazoglou, Curator

Original serie // 40 pictures // analog