- Dates
- —
- Curated by
- Marie Thérèse Champesme i Pascale Pronnier
Laura Henno
7 April–28 May 2006
Anyone who has ever witnessed a total solar eclipse remembers that disturbing yet fascinating moment just before the darkness sets in: animals fall silent and still, and everything seems to pause in expectation. Laura Henno’s photographs (France, 1976) evoke a similar sensation – the impression that time has been suspended, frozen, and that in this brief interval, human beings are delivered up to some invisible, mysterious force.
In the interior scenes, we are drawn into the private worlds of adolescent girls cut off from the world, isolated within their own reveries, paralysed by melancholy. In her Bed series, Laura Henno captures the fragility of these girls at the threshold of physical transformation. Elsewhere, however, the girls appear suddenly halted mid-motion, as if time itself had stopped them. Yet in both cases, the figure seems to abandon herself to her surroundings, to let herself be absorbed – engulfed even. The girl in Bed 1 sinks into her duvet; the one in Bed 3 hides half under the bed, clearly hoping to find refuge there. Meanwhile, in Freezing, the figure slowly submerges in thick, murky waters.
In these images, we sense the photographer’s close collaboration with her models – her meticulous search for the exact posture, the way a body nestles into its surroundings, the moment when figure and setting become indistinguishable. Even the landscapes, devoid of human presence, seem to be waiting for something – or perhaps life is simply hidden there, and we have not yet managed to see it.
The girls in Laura Henno’s photographs clearly appear as “characters” in a larger narrative. But we will never know their stories, what they are looking at, or what they are thinking. And sometimes, we do not even see their faces, as they turn their backs to us or are caught in darkness. Henno’s images are often constructed from bold contrasts of light and dark: only the figure stands illuminated, while the surrounding space is intentionally cast in shadow. Even when the entire scene is lit – Freezing, for instance, where a pale light bathes the landscape in an icy whiteness – there remains what might be called “the mystery beyond the frame”: the sense that something lies just outside our vision, something unknown that exerts an irresistible pull on the subject.
Undoubtedly, the quality of Laura Henno’s work lies in what is at once her immense modesty and her remarkable ambition: she does not aim to capture a subject’s personality or “soul” in a so-called “decisive moment”; instead, she moves beyond anecdote, leaving things in shadow or unsaid, thus preserving the mystery of both people and places.
