I’m a long-time fan of French photographer Rafaelle Lorgeril and had the pleasure of interviewing her early this year. Her work is a journey through a world she creates with her incredibly artistic mind. Since speaking, Lorgeril has been working on something very special, and has announced the launch of her first photobook, Où vont les souvenirs quand ils s’effacent ? (Where Do Memories Go When They Fade?)
This isn’t your typical photobook. Written in French, with English translations available, Lorgeril combines her images with poems. I love this approach, as it ignores the tired concept that an image should speak for itself, instead combining two art forms that can work in sync to give more power and meaning to the other.
“The idea came quite naturally from the way I experience photography,” Lorgeril tells me. She continued, “Poetry became a way of expressing what the photographs couldn’t say on their own. I didn’t want the words to simply describe the images, but to create another layer of meaning and emotion around them”.
Echoes, Not Captions
What I find most interesting is that the poems weren’t written to order. Some came in response to a specific frame, others had been sitting around for years before Lorgeril worked out where they belonged.
“I didn’t want to force a direct relationship between a photograph and a poem,” she explains. “Instead, I tried to create echoes between them: sometimes through an emotion, a memory, a color, or simply a feeling that was difficult to define.” As the book took shape, she says, it became “less about deciding which poem belonged to which image, and more about creating a rhythm between the two, almost like a conversation”.
That rhythm carries into the layout. A poem might sit alone in white space on one page, while elsewhere an image runs across both pages with no words at all.
The Images…
Lorgeril’s photographs are exactly the sort of thing I gravitate towards. They’re painterly and heavily textured: a snowstorm smeared across a field of bare trees, a red barn dissolving into a bruised sky, a figure painted with black serpents standing in a derelict room above cold blue water.
Nothing is handed to you. The focus drifts, the grain sits thick over everything, and the palette runs to muted greens, deep reds and that particular blue you only get at the very end of dusk. It’s the opposite of the clean, over-sharpened work that fills most feeds, and it’s all the better for it.
Fading memory is the thread here, and the pictures behave accordingly. You get an impression rather than a record, which feels far closer to the way I remember things.
Years in the Making
This being her first book, I asked how the process had felt. Her answer was refreshingly candid: “incredibly exciting and quite vulnerable”, built over several years from photographs, writing, memories and different periods of her life.
The hardest part, she says, was stepping back from individual pieces to consider the whole thing: “its rhythm, its silences, its transitions, and the emotions I wanted the reader to experience as they moved through it”. There were doubts along the way, which I suspect anyone who has tried to edit their own work will recognise.
I’ll leave the last word to her, because she says it better than I could.
“More than simply being a collection of photographs and poems, it feels like a fragment of an inner world that I was finally able to give a physical form to.”
The book retails at €35 ($40) or you can get the book, plus three prints for €39 ($45). It’s available for pre-order now on and you can grab your copy here.
You can see more of her work on her website.
