Naples, 1940s. A little girl named Charlotte was entrusted to an abusive uncle. A few years later, as a teenager, she fled, leaving everything behind only to return 60 years later, accompanied by her son, the photographer Ulrich Lebeuf.
In 2015, the artist went to this fantasized place whose dream vision is tinged with a distant maternal feeling. How to touch this ancestral fracture and translate into images, emotions that have crossed time enveloped in silence; how to apprehend the hidden part of its origins, with its psychological imprints?
His gaze then turns to the urban landscape and the people of the country, anonymous people whose daily life he imagines. Combining his own images with old vernacular photographs and postcards that might well have made up that missing family album, he constructs a powerful visual narrative blending documentary photography and photographic fiction. Images charged with the mystery that surrounds family secrets, unfathomable, impenetrable, inaccessible, with poetry and a touch of melancholy.
Cristianne Rodrigues
www.cristiannerodrigues.com
Spettri di famiglia, by Ulrich Lebeuf
Until March 19, 2022
Sit Down Gallery
4, rue Saint Anastase 75003 Paris
www.sitdown.fr
