For Laurence Leblanc, the photographic act is constructed by gradually impregnating herself with the subject and its environment; the resulting picture stems, in turn, from a meticulously constructed process. Extremely attentive to the violence of the world and to the chaos of destinies, she strips her gaze of all documentary curiosity—she knows that others have been there before her—to focus on what is not visible: the mutism of old pain, the texture of an absent gaze. Seul l’air (Only Air), a title inspired by a famous Pablo Neruda poem, is an intimate journey through Africa, Somalia, Nigeria and Congo in particular, together with Cuba, Brazil and Madagascar. Some of the wounds caused by non-development and indifference are examined: ‘What can a country do that eats, washes and makes love in the midst of its garbage?’ Thus Laurence Leblanc reacts to Freetown, where she accompanied the humanitarian organisation Action Contre la Faim and, with her complex mastery of light and colour, captured fleeting moments and hints of portraits which demolish conventional depictions of faces and places. ‘By accepting everyone’s subjectivity, we liberate ourselves from the Promethean aspiration to recreate reality’, said the writer Simon Njami. Neither metaphor nor abstraction, Laurence Leblanc’s Africa is a successful attempt at visually transferring an ever-elusive yet persistent perception of things.
B.R.