You could say that Anne-Sophie Costenoble is a portraitist. In her hands, the creepers take shape, the creatures free themselves, the ferns smile, the blondes challenge, the owls are invited.
Neither intention, nor message. Her poetry is full of joy. Because it is so delicate, it brings the hope of an enchanted world’s omnipresent gentleness and transforms our dark side, covering it with infectious beauty.The photographer embraces the accidental with an abandon, which want to be reciprocated, and randomly, her beloved delicate lighting links the strangeness of monochromatic colours with the intimacy of colourised black-and-whites. “It mustn’t be easy, I love the turmoil, the opaque and the vulnerable.”
She keeps a photographic journal that is intuitive, sensory and poetic, evidence of what she feels. “I take photographs for myself, it’s a sort of parallel life. To unlearn, to give myself permission, to wake up”. It’s all of life’s fragility that she talks about, with her child-like view. She goes out into the world and resists withdrawing from it. “Never leave the body, its pleasure, its deaf anguish, its silence and sometimes its intimacy.” Confident, she goes into the intimacy of these vegetable, animal, human or pictorial personalities. The gaze is caressing and invites a feeling of just being present in front of such beauty.
Anne-Sophie Costenoble constantly re-invents her work and impregnates it with what she sees, feels, reads, listens to. And if some authors, mainly Japanese, have taught her to feel the world, like haikus her images punctuate the fleeting beauty of a moment of life. “I glean fragile moments, poetic accidents. I don’t know what I’m looking for, but I have a feeling that something’s going to reveal itself. There will be this moment of hesitation, complicity.”
The world of her inspiration is vast and infuses into her imagination, sometimes symbolic, sometimes theatrical. “The discovery of the pictorial symbolist current changed my perceptions”, she added.”Painting regularly makes me feel like taking up my camera. Some music invites me to internalise, the theatre, particularly contemporary theatre, distorts time for me, the cinema brings me into a parallel daydream, dance awakens a sensuality.”
Her photographs become words, the words feelings. They come from afar and settle in. “Words have been with me for a long time. They are necessary for me, they nourish me and ‘broaden’ me. They are part of me and my work”. Guided by the sensitive, the travelling has been good for her. “It’s much easier for me to make pictures when I’m travelling. You are more fragile, ready for the unexpected when you meet someone, the senses are on the alert. But images are rare, it has to be something full of expectation. I love the ‘open’ images, not too obvious. On the other hand, a period of inactivity is necessary, to allow for some separation. A photograph sometimes stands out, meets another by accident and poetry is born” .L’heure bleu, a book, an exhibition and two completely different sensations that echo each other.
Cilou de Bruyn
Cilou de Bruyn is an author and consultant in photography. She lives and works on Brussels, in Belgium.
Anne-Sophie Costenoble, L’heure bleue
Published by ARP2
35 €
A special edition of 25 copies numbered from one to twenty-five, each accompanied by an original numbered and signed print, has been published.
Exhibition at the Musée de la photographie in Charleroi
Until 3rd December 2017
