FRANCE – PARIS
There’s something pulsating in Simone Kappeler’s photographs, something very much alive. Truncated, blurred images, tight, cinematic framing, unexpected colours, sometimes a little faded, reminiscent of old photographs… Far from the polished, skilfully composed “beautiful image”, her shots seem to be the fruit of a quest for instantaneity.
Born in 1952 in Frauenfeld, Switzerland, Simone Kappeler has explored all kinds of photographic techniques since 1970, using a Hasselblad, a Leica, a Fujiflex, a Polaroid or a disposable camera, out-of-date film or infrared, and more recently the cyanotype… It is in this experimental and poetic approach that she catches bits of life and bodies on the fly: a naked back against a “colourised” mountain landscape (Painted Desert, 1981), a neck in a car, a child’s puzzled face behind glass, a Cadillac caught between dog and wolf in Beverly Hills, an upside-down face monumentalised by a tight, low-angle framing…
Like the flowers whose shadows she captures, everything seems to quiver and move, and bodies sometimes even seem to escape her. What she’s looking for is to “catch the living”… Witness her series of photographs taken during a trip across the United States in 1981, recently rediscovered, which plunge us into a world of sensations, an intimate vision of the United States before the Internet and cell phones…
© Galerie Esther Woerdehoff
STÉPHANIE DULOUT
Simone Kappeler is represented by Galerie Esther Woerdehoff.
36, rue Falguière, Paris XV