The photographer and visual artist Eloïse Labarbe-Lafon has been interested in photography since her adolescence, more particularly in the techniques of film photography. While practicing her art, the young creative studied art history, but also cinema. Two worlds that lead her towards film restoration and colorization of documentary archives.
Since she was a teenager, Eloïse Labarbe-Lafon liked painting with pastel colours over black-and-white analog clichés. With a keen eye for capturing the essence of moments from her life, the vibrant personalities in her creative circle, and even her facial features, Labarbe-Lafon dedicates weeks to meticulously crafting her ethereal images entirely by hand. Passionate about cinema archives as much as ghost stories, Labarbe-Lafon is one of those with a profoundly playful soul.
„So, I take the photographs on black and white film, develop them, make the prints (often by myself when I have the space to set up a laboratory), and then I spend many hours painting the images with oil. Then I wait a few days for the paint to dry, scan the photos, retouch them and remove any dust that is stuck in the paint. I paint with brushes or use my fingers, searching for materiality in the photographic image. I like to leave my fingerprints on each painting. It's like leaving a mark, but most of all it creates something unique that couldn't be reproduced. I love the fact that you can dive into the photo and discover textural details that you wouldn't really notice at first glance. It transforms the photographed scene into an image that seems somehow unreal and incomprehensible in its details. There's also a very important relationship with time in my practice, which clashes with the inherent instantaneity of photography. I sometimes feel that I'm going against the grain, having chosen a photographic process that advocates slowness and cannot be accelerated. But it allows me to think differently. The moment is frozen, the process forces me to spend hours on a particular image, appreciating its immobility. In addition the materiality of the print and the paint makes it a unique object, a photo-object or a precious image which is a path I truly want to keep on investigating."
Eloïse Labarbe-Lafon