Born in France in 1963, Laurent Lafolie has been a photographer since 1980. The early years of his practice led him to collaborate with theater directors and, from 1994, with contemporary choreographers. Since 2005, his research has been devoted to independent artistic projects exploring the mechanism of image perception, mainly using the face as a medium. Over the last few years, it has touched on notions such as identity, intimacy, duality, self-image and reconstruction.

Working on images from archives has also led him to question themes of disappearance and our relationship with time. He took up this last theme again and linked it to memory in the evolving project Missingu, which currently comprises 400 faces photographed front-on with a view camera and printed on 3.6 g/m² paper. This paper is almost transparent, appearing like a veil, and places the images at the limit of (in)visibility.

In concrete terms, the works of Laurent Lafolie respond to a desire to make the image a photographic object, and to make the exhibition space a place of presentation, at once sensitive and playful. The concept of the photographic object is found from his first platinum-palladium* contact prints to the projects on washi**, glass and other mediums. It can also be found in the layout of the images, which leaves room for multiple readings: superposition, appearance/disappearance, visibility/invisibility, inversion, accumulation, deferral, etc.

For each presentation, several works are brought together and assembled to create a photographic distribution, in which the viewer progressively reinvents the images according to the movements that he or she makes and the viewpoints that he or she takes. Each presentation – indoors or outdoors – is thus a way of developing a construction adapted to its cultural and spatial context, in which the visitor’s relationship to the image becomes an act framed by the perceptible, shaped by the invisible and reaching towards the unrepresentable.

* The platinum-palladium process is a contact printing technique, on cotton, linen or kozo paper, whose qualities are both visual and tactile. Its look and feel are close to those of an engraving.

** Japanese paper