Corridor Éléphant presents the series by Sandrine Laroche After Hours. The photographer introduces it like this:
After Hours: Like the evening that never ends in Martin Scorcese’s film.
After Hours was designed using a homemade camera between the years 2020 and 2023. It evokes nostalgia, the anxiety of time passing, the human condition and is developed on Japanese awagami Kozo paper.
The freedom and free time that the confinements gave me were an opportunity to enter into my interior, literally and figuratively. This constrained contemplation, this face to face with myself, gave birth to these little sketches, a sort of English photographic tale in the colors of an old book, a dream both sweet and painful, on the edge of painting, nourished with memories and my daily life.
Every day, like a ritual, I sat in front of my piano to improvise little harmonies in front of the box which serves as a camera to make some images, of myself and the objects around me: a lampshade, flowers fresh or dried, a soliflore, a broken telephone… I photographed a fantasy and a memory. After Hours, is bathed in both this music and this silence, it is a constant dizziness, which rocks me darkly. I dug into my past, into a past that I can’t bring myself to let go of. I groped, experimented, watched for serendipity, to move towards something that was beyond me. The rabbit, for its part, is present in many series and is symbolic, a mysterious animal in the way it appears and then disappears as if by magic, it evokes fertility, life as well as death, and our interiority, like the burrow that it digs to serve as a refuge.
Nostalgia is omnipresent in my film and photographic work, it marks my existence like an indelible seal. A universal feeling, it touches on our quest for identity, our mortality, the meaning we give to life. Is the present a castle of memories in constant reconstruction, a future that has not yet happened, the reflection of a comforting past, the anguish of irreversible time?
Is man even capable of coming face to face with himself? How does he live in the present moment when he is aware of his finitude?
To depict nostalgia, this pleasant and nagging feeling, this “desire for we don’t know what”, inaccessible and ineffable was fascinating. I wanted to represent all its power only in images. The shooting using a large camera, the blur, the choice of prints on slightly yellowed Japanese paper stood out for me and reinforced this troubled feeling.
Sandrine Laroche
http://sandrinelaroche.art.free.fr
Youtube : Sandrine Laroche photographe
Facebook : fb.me/Sandrinelarochephoto
