Traveling in time remains decidedly inaccessible; on the other hand, squeezing the zest of the present into cocktails from the past seemed possible to me, – using, it goes without saying, current technologies … Anachronism, when it touches the plausible, had only rarely been discussed, to my knowledge, in photography.
Fate once brought me to a large collection of anonymous prints; among these, some were striking by their involuntary perfection. The authors, the identities of the characters? Mystery! … Were these amateurs aware of creating snapshots loaded with such evocative power, such dazzling power? No one will ever know, by definition … Deductions are the surest way to get lost in guesswork.
What could be more spicy than young women more or less naked to enrich these pictures? It’s very simple… Nothing! So I compared them with the 145,000 nudes made in recent years thanks to the precious fantasy of my dear models. Certain correspondences were imposed and when they were lacking, several of my friends offered to fill them.
I continue to be dazzled by the power of naked female beauties when they show up where they are not expected. They dispense eroticism, surrealism, poetry, impertinence at leisure … These ingredients decided me to tackle the task, to immerse myself in each photograph and to try to understand how it was made (what type of camera, what light, what lens, what film, and so on…) then gradually integrate a nude into it in a credible way: deep immersions in the renderings of the past!
These superb images, buried under the layers of time, I wanted to liven up with touches of glamor, daring or absurdity and in doing so, to radically divert them from their modest and intimate initial purpose. To mix people dead and buried for ages with young girls who are very much alive, as I write these words, represents in itself a disturbing anomaly, to wonder which ones turn out to be the most ghostly … To combine nostalgia with humor or the unusual, this is what these anonymous people also invited me to achieve by exhuming their wonderful souvenir photos.
Dahmane
