Shadows won't lie

Shadows won’t lie navigates the interplay between light and shadow through a layered photographic language combining analog and digital images. Dust, light leaks, and imperfections become essential textures, revealing the materiality of the photography.

Shadows won’t lie is a photographic journey spanning several years, a constellation of images taken throughout Sidonie Ronfard’s life. From the very beginning, she has photographed the women who surround her. In moments of waking and wanderings, in conversation, in groups, in gestures of presence and pause. These portraits don’t aim to document, but to transmit a shared vibration, a lived sensation.

Her process is rooted in a deep sensitivity to photographic material. Dust, light leaks, and loss of detail are not flaws, but evidence, marks of a living, breathing presence. Blending analog and digital techniques, control and surrender, Sidonie Ronfard builds a visual language where every image hesitates, vibrates, breathes.

The women in her photographs do not stand apart from their environments; they merge with them. Light brushes across their skin like wind across water. The landscape enters the body. There is a dissolution of boundaries : between inside and outside, between subject and surroundings.

This is where the title finds its weight: Shadows won’t lie. Perhaps light, in revealing too much, distorts more than it clarifies. Perhaps shadows - those spaces of ambiguity, retreat, and silence - carry a deeper truth. In the shadow, trust lives. In the shadow, there is space for emotion without display.

Color is central to her expression. Each tone holds an emotional temperature, translating invisible states into visible atmospheres. These images become sensorial spaces, where accuracy lies not in clarity, but in intensity. The work questions what it really means to see, and how close an image can get to the raw experience of simply being, together, in the moment.