Hotel Rooms
You like to dive into your image (…)
Man, no one has probed the bottom of your abysses
Charles Baudelaire “Man and the Sea”
Wasn’t the solitary life of businessmen confined to their hotel rooms already an allegory, a beginning of the post-COVID-19 world, of this dreaded “e-life”?
In his photographic prophecies, Rodolphe Blavy, director of an international organization at the heart of public policy decisions, former trader at Lehmann Frères and analyst at JP Morgan, s sends us back to the heightened vulnerability and isolation of our accelerated social decomposition.
Armed with an artistic sensibility that perhaps saves him from the loneliness of the cold numbers of everyday life, Blavy has engaged in the exercise of portraiture in hotel rooms around the world. For nearly 5 years, Reflex and tripod in his hand luggage, he captured the solitary backstage of the businessman at the hours when the doors of meetings are closed and condemn him to face-to-face with himself .
This cinematographic-like world, which seems to be staged, is nevertheless very real, captured by a systematic photographic approach. Nothing is altered in these hotel rooms, places of transition, places of life, homes for an evening or two. The images fix these anonymous and timeless moments.
Questions arise about the meaning of these intimacies created by others. On the meaning of a life before that was already so confined and that a virus may have damaged.
Eve Therond
