The Eye of Photography launches a new column with the support of MPB, called “Cartes blanches”. Each month, a French photographer will show an unpublished series while experimenting with equipment borrowed from the global platform for buying, selling and trading used photo and video equipment safely.
Our first Carte Blanche features Laurent Poleo-Garnier and his series “Double Agents,” consisting of self-portraits and transformative plays, with the assistance of headdresses from Maison Michel in Paris, reconstructing the artist’s own face into a mirror puzzle.
Double Agents
“For many years, headdresses have represented a fantastic mask that transforms my face, adorning it while propelling it towards ever more surreal horizons. At home, I recreated the setting of a photo booth with the help of the Fujifilm GFX 50S camera to play various characters from art history through a collision of references, both close and distant, precise and abstract.
These scenarios allow me to navigate through epochs, styles, and personalities, thus reassembling the puzzle of a mysterious face-off. In this series of self-portraits, the headdress acts as a new skin, a textured makeup made of pearls, embroideries, prosthetics, brocades, lace flowers, drawings, and other materials with mischievous personalities. The metamorphosis acts as a revealer of the multiple facets that compose my face, transforming the ordinary into adornments and the anonymous into an icon.
In this exploration, there is a quest for a new portrait that continues to reinvent itself as it unfolds. I have always been fascinated by the golden age of models, embodied by Veruschka, Penelope Tree, Twiggy, or Donyale Luna.
These women, who were the muses of their photographers, were also the first artists in the history of fashion. They were the ones who infused the energy of a session, amused and amusing partners eager to break the codes of representation. In my relationship with the model, I pursue the idea of connection, even fusion with the other during a session. I question the reversibility of roles and each person’s ability to embody new ‘skins’.
Thus, through self-portraiture, I decide to become myself a model, an androgynous creature sometimes bearded, sometimes made up. This identity explosion allows me to evoke an entire history of past festivities, where costume balls embodied an eccentricity out of time in the 1960s and 1970s. Where do these images come from? Are they archives from a photo booth? Fictitious members of a family album?
In this project, I act as a forger, a distinguished dandy who blurs the traces that could have led to him. With the complicity of Maison Michel, the famous Parisian milliner, I was fortunate to access some archival material from their collections. It then seemed interesting to rethink the headdress as an independent accessory, an ambiguous and complex character rather than a mere head covering.
With the collaboration of the puppet artist Elzbieta Jeznach, I created a video object filmed with the Sony HXR-NX200 camera, borrowed from MPB, which is a continuation of the self-portrait works. By transforming with her into different characters, I tell a surreal story of the hat, from Liza Minelli in a sparkling New York to Pina Bausch, Fellini’s Satyricon, Oskar Schlemmer’s geometry, or the remnants of a party at the Palace. In this film, the hat becomes a canvas, and the film’s soundscapes are a story in progress.
“Double Agents” aligns with the tradition of transformative photographers like Chris Smith or Michael Bailey-Gates, who consider their own representation as fertile ground for experimentation and eternal amazement in the face of a life as fragile as an apparition. If “I” is another, the game is also the means of an ‘ours.’”
Laurent Poleo-Garnier
Laurent Poleo-Garnier was born in Paris in 1995. He lives and works between his hometown and Berlin.
A graduate of the École des Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2019, his works are both photographic and performative. While directing models, the artist himself through the practice of transformation, disguise, and recomposition plays with expressions, makeup, clothing, and various attributes and adornments. Grounded in historical research, recalling a tradition of photographic portraiture and now-iconic fashion history clichés, his works seek to break the formalistic nature of the studio and highlight a reappropriation of multiple identities and imaginaries within a conscious subjectivity.
While willingly being his own model, Laurent Poleo-Garnier has also photographed a ‘sentimental family’ between Paris and Berlin during parties, an archive of a liberated, amused, and playful world, mirroring his collaboration with the dancer and choreographer François Chagnaud. In 2021, he won the PICTO Fashion Photography Award and the le 19M Photography of Art Trades Award for a collaboration with Maison Lesage. His photographs are present in the public collections of the Palais Galliera, the Fashion Museum of the City of Paris.
The artist and The Eye of Photography warmly thanks the platform MPB for its support. The “Carte Blanche” column could not exist without their collaboration.
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