Born in France, Laurent Lafolie is photographer since 1980. The early years of his practice led him to collaborate with theater directors and, from 1994, with contemporary choreographers. Since 2005 his research is engaged in independent artistic projects ; those works takes place principally at the intersection of two approaches: understand the mechanism of the images and using the face as a medium. Over the last few years, it has touched on notions such as identity, intimacy, duality, self-image and reconstruction.

Working on images from archives has also led him to question themes of disappearance and our relationship with time. This last theme he took up again and linked to that of memory in the evolving project Missingu, which is currently composed of 200 faces photographed front on with a view camera and then placed onto 3.6g/m² paper. This paper is almost transparent, appearing like a veil, and places the images at the limit of (in)visibility.

In concrete terms, the works of Laurent Lafolie responds to a desire to make the image a photographic object, and to make the exhibition space a place of presentation, at once sensitive and playful. The concept of the photographic object is found from the first ones platinum-palladium* prints to the projects on washi**, glass and other mediums. It can also be found in the layout of the images, where the place is left for multiple interpretations: superposition of images, appearance/disappearance, visibility/invisibility, inversion, accumulation, deferral, etc.

For each presentation, many different works are brought together, they are assembled to create a photographic distribution, in which the viewer progressively reinvents the images according to the movements that he or she makes and the viewpoints that he or she takes. Every presentation – indoors or outdoors – is therefore a way of developing a construction that is adapted to different contexts (cultural, spatial, etc.) in which the [relationship between the visitor and the] image becomes an act framed by what is perceptible, modeled by what is invisible and open to the unrepresentable.

* The platinum-palladium process is a contact printing technique using cotton, linen, kozo... papers for both their visual and tactile qualities, whose effects approximate those produced by engraving.

** Japanese paper