The Paris-based British photographer explores the female gaze in narrative portraits that blend cinematic drama and painterly aesthetics.
“Lying on her torso, I see these three words – “You’ll forget too” – tattooed among the mountains on the inside of her left arm. Words that have always haunted me. Will you forget me? Will I forget you? What memories will we keep? I withdraw from the present and watch our scene from above, wrapped up in each other in the dark (…)”. This is the premise of Tu oublieras aussi, the new series of narrative portraits by Laura Stevens. This English photographer, who studied at Leeds Metropolitan University and the University of Brighton, seeks to understand the human condition. For over a decade, she has been examining themes of intimacy, solitude, loss and desire. Her feminine, autobiographical gaze attempts to represent our unexpressed interiority in visual stories, for a better understanding of the self. It’s clear that Laura Stevens’s work, described in the tradition of intimate photographers such as Jo Ann Callis and Nan Goldin, has quickly won over museums, galleries, festivals and the French and international press.
INTIMATE SPACE
Following on from her series “A Latest Spring”, which captured the delicate and complex bonds of an extended family in the heart of a house in the south of France during the pandemic, Laura Stevens here explores the notion of the couple. She plunges us into the reminiscences of a personal and sentimental relationship. Her approach focuses on two bodies and the link between them, questioning the memory of desire and its representation. All that remains in her stagings are the vestiges of unfinished, (im)precise moments that interweave fantasy, dreams and reality. Intense colour shots, bathed in light and shadow, where cinematic drama lives with painterly aesthetics. “So much ardour in such a small space; that of a body, love and possible futures. Escaping our grasp, always elusive, evolving and eruptive. For years, I’ve been fighting these words written on your skin. But there’s nothing we can do. We will forget. Yet we cling on,” continues the photographer in her poetic and melancholy reflections. This virtuoso manages to imbue us with an atmosphere charged with carnal intensity and emotional tension.
