Une étrange attraction (A Strange Attraction)

A Strange Attraction is a work which questions our photographic relationship to the imaginary in the everyday and the familiar through my loved ones and their environments.

The imagination plays a central role in the formation of our individual and collective identities. It crosses social classes, ages and lifestyles, allowing each person to reinvent reality and form a space of refuge where our desires, fears and fantasies are projected. In the field of photography and for Vilém Flusser, imagination is this specific faculty of deciphering images through perception in order to find multivocal symbolic complexes, which leave room for interpretation.

A Strange Attraction is a research work that examines these notions and questions our photographic relationship to the imaginary in the everyday and the familiar. It explores the narrative power of images and the possibilities of their multiple interpretations.

Through a corpus of photographs taken between 2019 and 2023, this project takes as its starting point my relatives and their environments, located in France between Normandy, Ile-de-France, the North and the South. Initially built around portraits, I asked each person photographed how they wanted to be represented, encouraging them to question themselves and imagine themselves in a space. The environment present in these portraits led me to discover other familiar spaces from their daily intimacies, which unfold in a duality of places, between private and public.

From these simple and ordinary subjects, I went in search of anecdotes, visual poetry, traces or situations that generate several levels of reading. The first refers to our own collective or childish imagination, while the second raises more social, cultural and environmental issues such as ecology, technology or capitalism. These situations, whether found, recreated or staged, lead us to reflect on how we perceive and interpret our environments through photography.

A Strange Attraction is a sensitive project resulting from observations of our living spaces, what they reflect as images and what they trigger in our imaginations. It is a journey of discovery of others, of memory and habits, through photographs with multiple readings.