This week, the French photographer Colette Pourroy exhibits at the fairs of Paris Photo and Fotofever, on the stands of her gallery, Mind’s Eye, and of her publisher, André Frère. Eve reincarnated is the title of her latest series of images.
Eve, the first woman, the firstborn, the older sister, and the beloved sister…. There is something in this photographic series by Colette Pourroy that resembles a declaration of sisterly love, expressed along with the desire to revisit places of intimacy and the urgency of preventing memories from vanishing, devastating though they may be. These images seem haunted by the train of memory that inexorably pursues its course from childhood to adulthood. Dormant yet resistant, they recount a story that until now remained on the threshold of words and whose photographic transposition constitutes a palliative remedy to the pain of enunciation. The vaporous haze, the contrast between the milky whiteness and deep black, so characteristic of these works, confer a hallucinatory quality upon the series. Instead of sharpness, the photographer favors the blurriness of deliberately underestimated exposure, an imprecise focal distance, and brutally violent and crushing light as a means for expressing that which is unsaid.
And yet the malaise spawned by exploring these images comes not from these connections with the inexpressible but rather from the ambiguity within them. Thus, the viewer uncovers numerous indications of duplicity: a hand can be the one that helps but also the one that coerces, an open window may let fresh air into a stifling room, but may also be the instrument of a suicide, a sheet may innocently serve to hide childhood games or the playful tumult of the first lovemaking, but may also serve to cover a body in a morgue. In this visual narrative, an infinity of stories is woven and threaded by a certain number of leitmotifs: the opening, imprisonment, the double, dissimulation, the dividing line out of which “a lunar face” emerges, a fragile femininity. The symbolic journey through the three ages of life expressed by the literary quality of these images seems to favor adolescence, that uncertain moment of existence when everything can suddenly tumble. The presence of the photographer, of the sister, of her double, rediscovered after a time of solitude and huis-clos is no salvation. The other’s gaze, despite being photographic and empathetic, allows no reconstruction to occur: a window pane, a veil persists between each soul, separating them. An inevitable, foreseeable outcome is the climax of the composition.
Virginia Woolf’s writing and her description of emotions, emotions that often dissipate when someone dies, come to mind. “To feel anything strongly was to create an abyss between oneself and others who feel strongly perhaps but differently,” writes the British novelist in The Voyage Out. The subtle sharing and transmission of powerful emotion is the wonderful strength of Colette Pourroy’s work, since photography perhaps possesses a cathartic function for her, permitting her to stage episodes of her personal story and exorcise demons. Through the camera’s lens, buried memories are replayed and reactivated, her transposed feelings acting in a theater of emotions rather than being portrayed in the abrupt delivery of a series of moments. And so if this work is “photobiographical”, to employ the term invented by Gilles Mora in the 1980s, it is in the transformative process of those feelings into photographic emotion that arises not from an event we perceive, but instead, from the images that reveal themselves, through their breathless rhythm, and through the trance that animates them into a tale. In this manner do the titles, which might appear redundant given how well the pictures speak for themselves, become stage directions for the viewer who is enjoined to hunt amid the folds of the bedsheets, that place of both pleasure and death, for the skeleton of a broken life.
Héloïse Conésa
Héloïse Conésa is a contemporary photography curator at the Department of Photography, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.
Colette Pourroy, Eve
November 10 to 12, 2017
Fotofever
Carrousel du Louvre
99 rue de Rivoli
75001 Paris
France
Book signing of Ève réincarnée on Friday November 10, 2017, at 6PM.
http://www.fotofever.com/
