Artist Blog

Every week an artist whose single image was published by Der Greif is given a platform in which to blog about contemporary photography.

This series titled «When Water Comes Together With Water » finds its origins in the literary universe of the famous American short story writer Raymond Carver, whose writing is concise and where the silence of his wretched characters, is worth a million words. A few lines suffice to show his mastery of the ellipsis.

Claire Laude’s series is to be viewed in the light of introspection and therefore that of the ellipsis, her photos represent a single vast and contradictory identity drift that is some times psychological (seen from a spatial point of view) and other times physical.

Introspection is a delicate practice, in which well-defined distance is necessary in order to avoid the risk of excessive self-brandishing. This work’s first quality is that it manages to sidestep this very pitfall; Claire Laude delicately plays with a presence that has become fanciful as she creates contractions between the real world and the otherworldly. Through a certain starkness, she frees herself from the comfort of showing it all and feeding the bulimic eye. She brings us along a labyrinth where each image is a piece of the puzzle. She links landscapes to fading undefined worlds (these stationary voyages are undeniably timeless) and to bodies often seen from behind in a situation of precarious balance. In each case, one represents the extention and mental vision of the other -- how can one not feel the strong sense of loneliness and vulnerability before this tree, standing alone against savagery and destruction, or this ghost-like bookcase where all books are inverted, or this figure, almost primitive, lonely and unsteady, present and yet so absent. Claire Laude pleats, folds, inverts and unfolds the very meaning of presence.

Nonetheless, this instability must not be seen through the spectrum of melancholy alone as this series not only plays with the invisible and tipping points but it also leads us to experiencing something essential and skeletal, meaning almost structural and devoid of all mannerism. This nature and its nature, on which she acts or which she uses, creates an atmosphere of shattered glare. Tints become more palpable than visible, they are restrained, with bated breath (of life), she chooses spectral over spectacular. There is no posing, no artificiality in this work, it unfolds against the flow of today’s easy solutions. She shows nothing excessive or superfluous. We rub a surface that remains impalpable. This mirroring game reveals itself and reveals to us a photography that is not only an image and a presence but whose interest and role lie within its pleats.

«Perhaps I hadn’t said anything» -Raymond Carver (Cathedral).

Claire Laude (fr, 1975) is a photographer and architect based in Berlin, she is a founding member of the exhibition hall Exposure 12.

www.clairelaude.de