Sandrine Lopez explores bodies, nudes, unadorned faces, the unspeakable desire of being there. She engages with time she bringing it to a standstill. Beyond these clues, as close as possible to her emotions. These are not histories, not even a set of photographs. This is a process. She goes where her senses guide her, where the conscience might expand. Lopez raises these questions for us. She is currently preparing a book of her work Moshé and working on her film Dominique, scheduled for a September 2015 release.
Your work seems to be the follow-up to something, an entity, everything holds together, everything is linked. How do you choose your subjects? Is there a common thread among them?
It depends on the subjects. Some are chosen, others are almost “imposed” on me. I’m thinking about my work on Dominique. It started out as a summer job. I had no idea who I would meet there. It’s as if certain realities and experiences slowly became “subjects,” for the interest they had and for the potential that gradually became apparent. I think that the same ideas fascinate us, deep down. We explore different spaces in order to explore the questions themselves, but this act is driven by the same “motor.”
The nude body has a strong presence in your work. Fragile, intimate, raw and delicate. To be a close as possible to these anonymous nudes…
Since I started taking pictures, I’ve always found that there’s less “interference” in nude pictures. There are fewer clues to tell us about the person being photographed, where they live, what their social class is. This lets me be face-to-face with a human being more than anyone in particular. Even if the body and face tell us something about the model, I don’t enter too much into the details. And I like looking at nude bodies. There’s a great deal of spontaneous curiosity. We’ve been like that since children, curious to see what’s hidden behind. Apart from a few situations in private life, we rarely have access to nude bodies, and photography gives us special access to them. That said, I don’t like nudes for the nudity. And I’ve realized that it’s less and less present in my photographs.
Are you looking for an answer—for yourself—in your work?
Answers, no. It would be an illusion to think that photography offers answers. I think instead that photography raises questions and explores them. Engaging with a work is making a decision to have a particular experience and to make an attempt to record it. It’s a pretext to experience something else, something more.
Read the full article on the French version of L’Oeil.
PROJECTION
Soirée Extra Fort
Sandrine Lopez
On March 26th at 8pm
RECYCLART
Rue des Ursulines, 25
1000 Brussels
Belgium
