Lise Sarfati

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.

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.