Lise Sarfati has lived and worked in the United States since 2003. She has realized six important series of photographs there. They have been followed by exhibitions and publications. Each of her works makes clear the identity of an approach focused on the intensity of the rapport established with the person photographed, and of that person with the context. A vision in which the individual is environment, a map outlining a perilous cultural geography. The richness of perception is constructed without effects. The compositions are flawless in the simplicity and unity of the image – the style tends to be elementary and clean, avoiding all qualifications, but the traits of each thing and each person trace a hundred thousand folds. The dimension of the interplay of postures is that of a solemn immaturity: the scenery formed by the people and places is the silent crumpling of a dream in which each risks his or her skin. A feminine seduction tinged with fateful coincidences; the beauty of the adolescents looks like a magic spell. Their solitude and strangeness in the world turn the image into an echo chamber inhabited by the photographer, her subject and the viewer.
The earlier period of a photographic work carried out in Russia (continuously from 1989 to 1999) confirms the tendency of this research. She identifies a very precise and endless psychological spectrum. The projections, the ambitions associated with the immense space, the way in which they compose these figures, play an essential role: the supporting roles are incandescent. A determinism of the heroic, inevitably tragic figure, as if not even we really have another choice.
Oh Man is a series of seventeen large-format photographs, fifteen in color and two in black and white, created in Los Angeles from 2012 to 2013. Like Lise Sarfati’s previous series The New Life (2003), She (2009), and On Hollywood (2010), Oh Man is also set in the urban landscape. In this new work, Sarfati rejects the romantic picturesque. She continues to pursue a body of work which possesses a certain interior complexity and can neither be narrowed down to a singular or global perspective nor be perceived as an object.
Sarfati quotes Baudelaire regarding the series: “in certain almost supernatural states of the soul, the profundity of life reveals itself entirely in the spectacle, however ordinary it may be, before one's eyes. It becomes its Symbol.” She invests the city in a personal and metaphoric way. She rethinks what already exists. A primal vitality, visceral, unrestrainable, arising from rootlessness―men walking and the radical indifference of their bodies―occupies the empty heart of Los Angeles. She creates an image that is always engaged in a discourse with the viewer, an image in which we can project ourselves yet also feel free. The whole series is bathed in a solar light. This luminous point of view acts as an illumination on the image as if to light our vision. Sarfati worked very precisely on the choice of this intense solar light: “I worked on the distance to create an ambiguous link in the relationship between the man and the landscape. My images are large format but through their equilibrium allow the viewer total freedom to engage with the landscape or the human figure.”
The figures in the photographs, characters like those she defined in her series The New Life, She and On Hollywood, are ghostly here. Oh Man creates an uncanny feeling: the men are both anonymous and somehow familiar. They are filmed by surveillance cameras and become a detail of the virtual landscape. What J.G. Ballard, one of Lise Sarfati's references, concerning computerized surveillance systems calls: "an Orwellian nightmare come true, but disguised as a public service."
Oh Man gives us the feeling that we could be downtown in any US megalopolis. The American urban landscape in Sarfati's photographs scrolls along, the warehouses like a long list of signs without affect: United States Post Office, NAB Sound, Toys, Clothing, Handbag, Cosmetics.
Throughout her different series, Sarfati never ceases to interrogate herself on the void and the relationship between the man and the outside world. InOh Man we are swayed by the ambiguous sensation of the landscape, between the attraction to the void and the enjoyment of the space crossed by the walking man.
A family album preserves only carefully selected photographs. Out of an entire life, it stores only handpicked moments, privileging special occasions, happy ones usually, and consigning the rest to oblivion: happy faces, relaxed moments, places of leisure rather than work. It tends to underline a group’s social links and affective relations, to highlight an identity, a communal spirit, a shared life and destiny. The portrait of the couple or group, with all its attendant conventions, is one of its inescapable figures.
The family album tries to register the evolution of a particular human community, to write its story and scan the passage of time with each succeeding page. None of this figures in She: instead of a chronology, time is stopped, it appears to stammer and bite its own tail. There is no group photo or desire to stage a collective destiny, but only isolated models and individuals who do not seem to communicate amongst themselves, or only barely; no happy moments or picturesque places, only indifferent moments in ordinary places; no strong gesture, none of the conventional poses, and no complicity with the photographer.
The models pose, but reservedly, more often than not without looking into the camera. And even when we do see their faces, we don’t really seem to see them. They are here, but they are always also there, elsewhere. When we close the book and think a bit about it, we cannot but see She as the anti-family album par excellence.
By Lise Sarfati, Azzedine Alaia, Rick Owens, Carla Sozzani
Publisher : Publisher : Magnum Photos
2009 | 216 pages
This edition of Fashion Magazine is devoted solely to the work of French photographer Lise Sarfati. In her portraiture, Sarfati dramatizes the intensities of fashionably clad adolescence in the insolently sensual creatures she encounters on the roads of America.
Couching their lightly worn street elegance in moody sobriety, Sarfati presses pause on the activities in which her subjects are engaged and extracts their quintessential sensuality, to produce a type of photography that partakes of both fashion and portraiture idioms without quite belonging to either. Redolent in this respect of Alain Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad, in which the camera deliberately and continually "overgrooms" the emotional drama, Sarfati's work is likewise utterly seductive and compelling.
A series of 50 photographs by French photographer Lise Sarfati. The photographs were taken in cities like Austin, Asheville, Portland, Berkeley, Oakland,Los Angeles, New Orleans and some small towns in Georgia. In each of these portraits, Lise Sarfati dramatizes the complexity of adolescent identity; within unfamiliar territory - both emotionally and physically - where the simplest of feelings become exalted and everything is lived with an intensity that adults will never again be able to feel.
Charles Muir Lovell has long been passionate about photographing people within their cultures. Upon moving to New Orleans in 2008, he began documenting the city's second line parades, social aid and pleasure clubs, jazz funerals, and brass bands, capturing and preserving for posterity a unique and vibrant part of Louisiana's rich cultural heritage.
Eric Bonjour has been investing as a business angel in the Silicon Valley while building his personal art collection of contemporary art. After obtaining the Art, Law and Business master’s degree at Christie’s Education in 2020, he founded ART.co to fill the secondary market gap. We asked him a few questions about his new powerful tool for Art Collectors.
Charlie Lieberman is a photographer and cinematographer based in Southern California. Best known for his work on the TV show, Heroes, Lieberman has also been developing a body of photographic work since the 1960s. His current practice seeks out humble landscapes, avoiding the iconic in an effort to impart a sense of memory, contemplation, and awe. Lieberman is currently an Active Member of The American Society of Cinematographers.
Diana Cheren Nygren is a fine art photographer from Boston, Massachusetts. Her work explores the relationship of people to their physical environment and landscape as a setting for human activity. Her photographs address serious social questions through a blend of documentary practice, invention, and humor.
Castro Frank is a Los Angeles based visual artist who has translated his personal experiences of growing up in the San Fernando Valley into a signature journalistic and candid approach to photography.
Emerald Arguelles is a photographer and editor based in Savannah, GA. As a young visual artist, Emerald has become an internationally recognized photographer through her explorations and capturing of Black America.
Dave Krugman is a New York based Photographer, Cryptoartist, and Writer, and is the founder of ALLSHIPS, a Creative Community based on the idea that a rising tide raises all ships. He is fascinated by the endless possibilities that exist at the intersection of art and technology, and works in these layers to elevate artists and enable them to thrive in a creative career. As our world becomes exponentially more visual, he seeks to prove that there is tremendous value in embracing curiosity and new ideas.
I first discovered Lenka Klicperová's work through the submission of her project 'Lost War' for the November 2021 Solo Exhibition. I chose this project for its strength not only because of its poignant subject but also for its humanist approach. I must admit that I was even more impressed when I discovered that it was a women behind these powerful front line images. Her courage and dedication in covering difficult conflicts around the world is staggering. We asked her a few questions about her life and work.
James Hayman is a photographer as well as a film / television director, producer, and cinematographer based in Los Angeles. We asked him a few questions about his life and work.
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