Laure Vasconi : Villes de cinéma

From Cairo to Rome, from Hollywood to Babelsberg, from Paramount to Fox, Laure Vasconi has strolled, roamed, wandered, and dreamed- always armed of her articial limb, her camera. In more or less dormant or abandoned studios, she has observed the backstage of twentieth century dream factories, capturing the upside-down and inside-out : the unconscious cinéma taking place behind the silver screen.
In the most deserted locations, sometimes occupied by just a few employees, invisible ants indispensable to the great hive that is Cinema, Laure continues to photograph what the crowds never see: the gaps in the film, the moments in between the shoots, the before and after of the manufacturing process. Empty warehouses, trestles, chair rails, machinery, locker rooms, cupboards, drawers, costumes, wigs and mannequins form a world engulfed in a dark labyrinth, an amniotic fluid of movie life which is always invisible from public view. Geologist, speleologist, cinema explorer, Laure Vasconi creates an eloquent work: revealing the hidden depths of the largest dream machine  of the last one hundred and twenty years. 120 years is old, and it’s also a venerable age, a slow agony that the photographer can record, revealing the last traces of an art and a world of “home made  industry” which is now in the process of being submerged by the digital era.
Documenting these behind-the- scenes of a changing art is also akin to producing a genre of still- image film, it prolongs the magic of cinema and its evocative power: such is the paradoxical art of Laure Vasconi, such is the spell-binding beauty of her film studio series.