The project L’Hôtel Imaginé is intended to be an imaginary photographic experience, an inner journey throughout these ports of call, at once within and without the city. What remains in these hushed rooms and long corridors once they have been abandoned by their occupants? The soul of the hotel, certainly, that of objects, chairs, wardrobes and pillows that have secretly kept the traces of those who once visited, and which wait, suspended in time, to be inhabited once again.
“Travel is a kind of door through which one passes, leaving behind known reality to enter into an unexplored reality that appears to be a dream.” (Maupassant)
Born in 1977, Laurent Dupont graduated from ICART-PHOTO in 2000 with a DEA in the history of photography. He lives and works in Paris.
His work, shot exclusively on black-and-white film, strives to show, in the words of Jacques Brunius, “what the eye doesn’t see; to show what the eye sees, but differently.”* His sculptures, moving (as opposed to still) lifes, and landscapes exude a sophisticated and baroque poetry, a sense of mystery (revealed?) that leads the viewer to another visible and tangible form of the world, one where shadows play with light to be better penetrated by it, and where chance also has its place.
* Edouard Jaguer “Les Mystères de la Chambre Noire”, Flammarion, Paris, 1982.
L’Hotel imaginé – Laurent Dupont
Until June 19th, 2012
Salon Ernest de l’Hôtel Lutetia
45 Boulevard Raspail
75006 Paris
open every day : 5pm – 1am
Infos : [email protected]
