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Flore, a Frenchwoman in the East

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As part of Festival PhotoMed Var 2017, Maison Flotte in Sanary-sur-mer features the dreamlike black-and-white images by the French photographer Flore.

“The true paradises are the paradises we have lost.”

~ Marcel Proust, Time Regained

To be able to travel, as in the 19th century, for months on end, with trunks and crates of books, across unfamiliar lands; to make one’s way slowly, in search of otherness that reveals itself only to the patient eye; to journey to the land of myths, to the mysterious gilded Orient of the Symbolists, the last long-term travelers: It’s been some years since Flore set off on just such an impossible adventure. She offers us here a first glimpse into her journal of travel across a land of dreams: solitary palm trees, deserted tracts, peaceful interiors inhabited only by a few humans and cats. The artist embarked on a quest for a dream image still nestled in reality, and no one better than her could give voice to the past hiding in the shadows and in the reflections of the present.

Time creeps slowly before her camera, which she brings as close as possible to her subjects, rejecting any tricks or gimmicks. This close contact with the world yields instants of grace: a timeless silhouette in a quiet street, the shimmering sunlight in the desert.

Her quest is nostalgic: the artist wants to follow in the footsteps of past photographers who explored the world with their camera. What is an image? What is memory? Doesn’t photography build worlds that become more real than reality? Searching for a reflection of the Great Pyramid of Giza in the waters of the Nile, seen so often in vintage photographs that it had almost become a memory, Flore had to give up: the Aswan Dam had made this sort of mirror play impossible. Made wiser by that failure she revived her mental picture thanks to the powers of photography. Distant and barely outlined, the pyramid glides across the image, as if about to disappear… What did we see? Is the world really where we think it is?

A Frenchwoman taking refuge in the East, a reverse exile: her images invite the audience to ask themselves, “what am I really seeing?”

With her snippets and fragments, Flore makes an offering of suspended time and expands our vision, thereby enlarging the world with unexpected places.

Susana Gállego Cuesta

Susana Gállego Cuesta is a photography curator at the Musée du Petit Palais in Paris.

 

Flore, Une femme française en Orient

May 18 to June 11, 2017

Part of Festival PHOTOMED Var 2017

20 Quai Charles de Gaulle

83110 Sanary-sur-Mer

France

http://festivalphotomed.com/

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