An exhibition featuring the 2015 prizewinner of the Institut Français’ Hors les Murs residency program has just opened at the Lyon gallery Le Réverbère: Geraldine Lay’s photographs from the series North End will be on display until April 30. These images were created during an extramural residency program, which afforded the photographer an extended stay on the other side of the Channel to explore some towns in the UK.
In 2009, the association Diaphane in Beauvais gave me carte blanche to do a project “Destinations Europe,” and I chose Glasgow. Since then, I have been going back to the cities of northern England and Scotland. I’m interested in cities that witnessed the end of the industrial era and were the backdrop to the large-scale social movements of the 1980s, which ushered a new form of society. I love the idea of documenting a time period or a place in an oblique way, and I love being a bearer of stories.
As the 2015 prizewinner of the Hors les Murs residency program at the Institut Français, I was able to travel around the UK, between Manchester, Cardiff, Bristol, and London, and complete this series. I had wanted for some time to combine street photographs with more intimate portraits of inhabitants in their own homes. When I photograph in the street, I am particularly fond of moments when everything seems posed, as if arranged in a movie set where, as Jean-Luc Godard once said, one must “try to identify in the movements of the crowd the starting point of fiction.” By contrast, photographing people in their own homes inevitably means asking them to pose, directing them, making them “play.” One must be able to ease them into their inner movement. Through the conversations and the time spent together, I managed to establish a climate of trust in order to go beyond a simple mise-en-scène and strike a balance between posed photography and a snapshot taken in the anonymity of the street. I work in a very relaxed, instinctive way; attentive to encounters, to light, I move forward by coming and going, perusing contact sheets, juxtaposing images. It’s about confronting the private and the public, the immobile and the flux, about observing the interior and exterior decor and raising the question of fiction in another way.
EXHIBITION
North End
Géraldine Lay
From January 29th April 30th, 2016
Galerie Le Réverbère
38 rue Burdeau
69001 Lyon
France
http://www.galerielereverbere.com
