Manon Lanjouère
Bleu Glacé
[ EPF 2017 – YOUNG TALENT AWARD / FUJIFILM FINALIST ]
Bleu Glacé is a cabinet of curiosity, a “scientist” study synthetically rebuilding the Icelandic landscape. The use of synthetic material is to question our daily use of plastics, resins and polymers in an exponential way, and how it can change the geological landscape of the surrounding world in a long term. If Iceland magnetizes our attention, it is essentially because of its geology.
“Those landscapes are a wonderful geological lesson, the La Redoute catalog of the volcanic and ice form,” wrote Michel Tournier in his novel, Les Météores.
Bleu Glacé is this catalog of landscapes that everybody imagines to meet in Iceland, a catalog for an immobile traveller, a lounge traveller.
The imagination makes the object we’re thinking about and desiring appears before our very eyes in order to take possession of it.
The resulting image is an interiority synthesis, rebuild in studio. The object is absent but all of its qualities are in front of us, the impression is here, as well as the characters certainly looking like human beings but who definitively are characters without any intentionality.
In those objects that I produce, everybody is free to see a waterfall, an iceberg, a plastic bag or polystyrene. The imitation is only partial, as only few components are replicated. However those components are sufficient to give the form a representative value. The concept is then appearing.
The images created this way summon and question the “primary ardour of water, wind, clouds, and sheer colours projected on the sky and the horizons” that Samivel describes in his book L’Or de l’Islande.
Bleu Glacé has for ambition to represent this mystical elsewhere, land still unknown.
Short Bio
Manon was born in 1993. She lives and works in Paris. After receiving an undergraduate in Art History at the Sorbonne University in Paris, she decided to dedicate herself fully into photography and joined Gobelins School of Image in 2014 from which she graduated top of her class in 2017. Through a parallele evolution among a theater in Paris, her practice of photography is characterised by directing and settings. Her work influenced by litterature is focusing to depict fictional worlds. Worlds in which she tries to understand the interraction between the landscape ant the human.
Her work bleu Glacé has been exhibited in 2017 in several festivals in France (Itinéraire des photographes voyageurs in Bordeaux, Festival la Gacilly in la Gacilly, les Rencontres d’Arles in Arles, Nuits photographiques de Pierrevert in Pierrevert, les Rencontres photographiques du 10eme in Paris) and was a finalist of the Price QPN (Nantes, France) and a finalist of the Bourse du Talent Studio.
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The Emerging Photographer Fund is supported by generous donors to the Magnum Foundation
