© Bénédicte Blondeau from the series 'Ce qu'il Reste'

Intimate places (Lieux intimes) – it's not just the title of your project but also a recurring dimension in your work. A bed, an armchair, a curtain, a room, a house, a nature, a place. Photography as a means of "intro-spective," or again as a mirror of an inner universe reflected in the world. What are the reasons that push you to speak through images?

Bénédicte Blondeau (BB): Whether in an urban context or in nature, most of my photographs are taken in my direct environment, and are actually more about the experience I have around the portrayed subject than about the subject itself. I would say that my work is about perception, it is how I look at the world at a particular moment, which is why they carry this intimate, inner-world dimension. What drives me to make images is more of an impulse, a necessity in a particular situation, rather than a clear thought or reason. The autobiographical aspect is thus inherent to my approach.

As never before in the history of our species, we are exposed to almost infinite visual stimuli. How does this widespread and anthropologically rooted phenomenon affect your production and creation of images? What is your relationship with your pictures?

BB: Even if they are hard to avoid, I think that I am instinctively keeping a certain distance from those stimuli (by staying away from the visual pollution of the big cities, having a very low usage of social media, or not consuming any mainstream visual entertainment for many years), which helps me to stay focused on what really matters to me as an artist but also just as a human being. This infinite amount of images you are mentioning requires a fast tempo to be read. My images are on the complete opposite of this: they require the viewer to slow down to look at them. They are not made with the intention of drawing the attention of the spectator, on the contrary, they carry a form of meditative aspect that invites contemplation, which can only happen in a focused, immersed state of mind.

© Bénédicte Blondeau from the series 'Ce qu'il Reste'

© Bénédicte Blondeau from the series 'Ce qu'il Reste'

© Bénédicte Blondeau from the series 'Ce qu'il Reste'

There is a degree of uncertainty, suspension of judgment, and even fragility in your photographs. A climate of "anesthesia" opens up to a parallel universe and offers the observer a chance to see one's way of proceeding in the world. How urgent is it to break this spell of images produced by social media and, instead, reinvent photography as a means of creation, of non-remote guided expression? From this point of view, your practice embodies a desire for freedom to look at and observe the world as if it were new.

BB: It’s important to keep on questioning the way we look at our environment. We are mostly not aware of how our perception of reality is filtered by the messages and ideologies conveyed by the media in our societies. We often forget that in a different context, our judgment could be very different from what it is here and now. This way, there is indeed a desire for freedom in my images, to liberate oneself from those filters and go back to a new, unaltered perspective on things. I can see a parallel with a form of meditative practice, a process in which one gets rid of the judgments and ideas polluting the mind in an attempt to look at things differently, in a way that I would certainly not call objective (because the way our brain functions, constantly categorizing and interpreting reality shows us that everything is a matter of perception and that objectivity does not exist), but rather authentic, coming from within.

© Bénédicte Blondeau from the series 'Ce qu'il Reste'

Therefore, a change of perspective concerns the body, the world's perception, and a need for care and attention. In the series ce qu'il reste, the transformations and conquests of humans are related to the fluid and organic movement of the jellyfish. Somehow to life in its essence, with the ability to make a metamorphosis. From jellyfish to a sedentary polyp. From caterpillar to butterfly. The latter are transformations that are biological and life-sustaining. Unlike the human ones, sometimes they seem to deny it. Where does this awareness stem from? Art and environment, what is your perspective? And tell us about the importance of returning it in book form ...

BB: This awareness stems from life changing experiences that took place over the last few years. As I said before, my work carries an intrinsic autobiographical aspect. It’s all about a vision, it translates the way I look at a certain reality at a certain stage. I have been travelling a lot over the last few years and I have lived in different countries. Those comings and goings led me to constantly having to shift my perspective, in order to re-evaluate the world from a new angle, according to those many different contexts I found myself in. Each of those experiences invited me to question the norms and standards of a specific environment, which ultimately enriched my vision of reality (a « vision » that does not forget that reality also refers to what we don’t see…). The most important change probably came from the immersion in nature that took place during the years I spent in Portugal. This experience led me to see things from a certain distance (that you can, I think, clearly feel in my images) and look at the « bigger picture »: the importance of the organic, the cycles of the elements in the natural world, the emphasis on what precedes us as a species and what will remain after our passage on earth. The fact of having the project ce qu’il reste in the form of a book is important to me in the way that it can free itself from a specific time and space and circulate around the world, allowing the viewer to also come back to it in a later phase of life. Even if the images stay the same, their interpretation will keep on changing with time, leading the person who looks at them to continuously find new meaning.

© Bénédicte Blondeau, 'Ce qu'il Reste', 2019, XYZ Books

© Bénédicte Blondeau, 'Ce qu'il Reste', 2019, XYZ Books

© Bénédicte Blondeau, 'Ce qu'il Reste', 2019, XYZ Books

You are part of the exhibition those eyes - these eyes - they fade, which gathers your photographs with those of Nigel Baldacchino, Bernard Plossu, and Awoiska van der Molen. Curated by Anne Immelé, the exhibition at Valletta Contemporary (Malta) approaches metaphysical photography, from the apparent clarity of day to the evanescent depths of night shadows. How important is it to create these forms of dialogue in photography, which somehow deny the assumption of truth that the technical mechanism preaches (its defining purpose)? Your work certainly fits well into this possibility of experiencing poetic contemplation. How do you see the possibility of expanding the field of investigation to the crossover with other works?

BB: All the works from this exhibition have this in common: they don’t really go about a very specific subject, in the end, the subject itself – what is represented in the picture – is almost an excuse to express a certain vision. They indeed all use a medium that by definition records fragments of reality in order to question that same reality and take distance from any notion of truth. Those are works that claim their own subjectivity, they are actually about the looking. The dialogues between their specific, poetic contemplating universes also relate to the title of this exhibition: these eyes - those eyes - they fade. The collaboration with the other artists and the crossover with their works is a very enriching experience since they somehow have a very similar approach as mine, but each in their own way. It’s very interesting for me to discover how these works find a way to go beyond the subject in order to reach another, almost metaphysical dimension as you have mentioned. Each of those experiences will definitely reinforce my approach in a way that I have not yet discovered, but that will most probably contribute to the relentless shaping of a certain vision that is, just like the environment in which we evolve, in constant transformation.

© Bénédicte Blondeau from the series 'Ce qu'il Reste'

Bénédicte Blondeau (website)