Anne De Gelas photographed herself mourning over her husband, who died suddenly before her and her son’s eyes. Driven by a compulsive desire for images, she continues to photograph herself in sober black-and-white with a hint of surrealism. The idea behind the exhibition is not to tell a story, but to create a powerful atmosphere, a kind of enclosed, directionless space, where each image can be read separately, free of any narrative structure.
Did this work of love serve as a kind of therapy?
I don’t know if it helped me. That wasn’t the goal. Every day for a long time, I’ve worked with a notebook, where I put collages, drawings, dreams, reflections, ideas, traces. I’m still doing this. Now it’s more vital than ever, but it had always been.
When my husband died, the notebooks changed. They followed the trajectory of my life and I was experiencing a particularly painful time. The themes of suffering, mourning, loneliness, with my child, evolved in a powerful way. The content became darker, more obsessive, because the question of going on kept repeating itself, the question of the meaning of life. These are research notebooks, where everything is juxtaposed and a work starts coming together. These notebooks remains the site of an artistic work.
But I never once considered my work to be something that helped me live. It constantly confronts me with the situation so that my “convalescence” will happen the right way and will not be an escape.
Narrator and heroine, your work is you—your material is your life—and yet you say nothing about your life. How would you describe you work?
I am not the heroine of my own work. There’s no heroine, no hero. The narrator? Let’s say that I’m the one unspooling the thread. My body is my tool through which I best express my feelings. My material is my life, or rather, life itself, which I tell in pieces through angles and themes that are important to me. This is not an autobiography.
The questions are constant and reinforced at certain stages of my life. For example: those related to femininity, to the childhood that stays with us, to the difficulty of finding a place in life, and to depression, can all be found in my work.
Selfies, staged pictures of your world—it’s like an almost compulsive desire for images. If you were commissioned to tell a different story, would you feel comfortable?
I don’t take selfies. These are self-portraits. They’re not at all the same.
I photograph myself in order to best express the questions I raise through an “object” that I “master” or rather attempt to master: my face, my body. It’s probably right to call it compulsive, an obsession to represent violent and contradictory feelings.
I don’t consider myself a “professional photographer,” or really a photographer at all. I use photography because the technique corresponds to what I need for my work.
I don’t work like a photographer. I don’t do commissions (anymore). It’s not possible for me. I can’t find a link between the two activities. It’s like something broke. I felt like I was being dishonest with my clients. My life is not the life of a photographer.
Read the full article on the French version of L’Oeil.
EXHIBITION
L’amoureuse by Anne De Gelas
From January 15tj to March 7th 2015
Galerie Le Petit Espace
15 rue Bouchardon
75010 Paris
BOOK
L’amoureuse
Photographis by Anne De Gelas
Editions le caillou bleu
2011
