THE FULL FLOWER OF YOUTH, by Dagara Dakin, independent curator
It may seem strange, even incongruous, to wonder if the Adonis Landscapes – as the photographer Anne-Lore Mesnage named her series – are portraits, landscapes or still lifes. Hesitating between these different kinds, one should refer to the title of the series to get the answer, are we tempted to retort. But a series of photographs isn’t only to be identified by its title to be distinguished from another one. Words come with images, these images sometimes contradicting the words.
For example, in the landscapes of Anne-Lore Mesnage, faces of teenagers make up diptych with landscapes which can’t always be considered as such. Sometimes identifiable, at another time concealed, her “portraits” seem caught in a vegetation that blurs identity, as if a mask was making room for the landscape to which the “portrait” echoes.
All her series is in fact about metamorphosis and the role environment plays in our lives. “Too often, human beings seem to forget that they operate in an ecosystem among interdependent elements to which they are subjected. They then put in jeopardy the natural links to which they are related.” says the artist.
Through the images and the title of the series, we can not help thinking that there is probably an implicit reference to the age of youth, considered as the spring of the lives of the mortal beings we are.
But we can also think about the Metamorphosis of Ovid and all these stories in which, at the end, the heroic figure fades and leaves a symbolic plant or flower signifying his passage on Earth. The nymph Clytie, lover of Helios, is changed into a sunflower, while Tristan and Isolde, are respectively embodied or reincarnated into a glycine and a honeysuckle. And the photographer to clarify about the teenagers she “immortalizes”: “Successively embodying the divinity Adonis, they partially get integrated by the plant they seem to tame. Referring to the Renaissance art (Da Vinci, Flandrin, Boccaccino), they stand, proud and upright, ready to take root. “.
The photographs by Anne-Lore Mesnage, at the same time summon literature and fit into the history of photographic practice and more broadly, in the artistic field.
