Burned Negatives

“We all used to take analogic photos of people we loved: family, friends, lovers… In the meantime, life has done its work with marriages, separations, break-ups, deaths. Then, one day, by chance, we stumbled upon these photos, hidden deep in our drawers. At the sight of some, our hearts capsized at the sight of the vivid reminiscences that surfaced, in bursts.

For the most painful, we wanted to erase the open wounds they still caused. We tore them up to get rid of the emotion associated. But with silver photography, there is always a trace left: the negative. My idea was to erase the memory at the source, where it can disappear forever and for good, by burning these negatives. I photographed models (in studio and outdoor) with 10 cm x 12 cm negatives. Unusual, this size helped me to precisely target the areas to burn. As often, the result turned out to be very different from what I had imagined. The negative is twisted, bloated, disturbed, close to a surrealist work of art. And the photo prints, for their part, exude a dreamlike quality that questions the look. What do we see in these distorted forms? What memory(s) does it conjure up?”