"A Pompidou commissioner told me that he took photos just like his grandmother's." Thus, from the outset, it is difficult to interpret the comment, but Stéphanie Delpon took it for what it was, a compliment. Snapshots that looked old, a la Vivian Maier, or rather timeless, including ones that had color, frozen moment and warm in a given space, but lost in time.
It was about silent portraits and at the same time incorporated with stereo music, with sometimes wrinkled, but beautiful melodies. What remains-t-il de nos amours? CharlesTrénet. Tous les garçons et les filles. Francoise Hardy. Like a boomerang, by Serge Gainsbourg, which reads: "I feel a boom and a bang shake my wounded heart, love like a boomerang takes me back to times past."
Delpon pays homage to all the women who pump the diastole of Paris in a work that has already lasted four years and is shown in large format right there where it was born, on the street. Her camera is an iPhone, her training, amateur or simply self-taught. The result speaks for itself, pixel by pixel.
"I started a while ago, not so much to avoid being isolated from the world at a time when it was the easiest, but to capture what surrounds me in detail and with pleasure," says this photographer on the phone who has always moved in the world of advertising and that, in the viewer, goes from black and white to color naturally.
"It is curious because when the photos are in black and white, melancholy and loneliness emerges and seeing the images affected me in some way. On the other hand, with color, the city changes, it is more joyful and smiling. When a woman appears woman dressed in pink or red, a timelessness arises. It is not known when they were taken", acknowledges the artist.
Paris has its black holes, sometimes it's dirty, it's noisy and it's always busy with construction. The traffic is wild. Like in many other cities. But this time, at least in the work of the photographer, who moves away from the postcard, ugly corners have no place in this galaxy.
In the conversation, great names in world photography come out, whom he admires for their vision, for their sense of opportunity or for their discretion. She does it out of her devotion to them, never to compare herself. For months the photographer has covered the streets of Paris with her works in giant size.
“It must be said that in Paris this project is easier because beauty is everywhere. There is a mythical, eternal Paris, which is that of the light of Doisneau or that of Cartier-Bresson”. In the photographic, musical and cinematographic conversation, Vivian Maier also appears, master of invisibility taking portraits of her with her Rolleyflex at her chest height.
"The phone is very discreet, much more so than the camera, but you have to be respectful of who you photograph," recalls the French artist. Most of her images are like the baisers volés, the stolen kisses from the song and from the film of the same name; but in some the protagonists are friends or acquaintances who pose for the artist.
Men rarely appear in her work. It is as if Paris were a woman by and for women. A place where love is lost, frayed and a nest is woven from the threads where hope is sheltered, numb with cold, almost defeated. Lost Illusions repertoire (we salute you Balzac); compendium of Dead Leaves (we praise you Prévert); album of simple Amours (we die for you, Annie Ernaux), a glass of wine that falls and stains the pages of a book, withered footprints, erased footprints, flowers of good or evil?, fallen petals that have not yet said their last word and still perfume the air.
