(ENGLISH —ORIGINAL— VERSION)

Reflection of a New World: A Conversation with Alain Laboile about His Work

Translation by Tiffany Amber Elías Trimble

In documentary family photography, there is a temptation that few artists manage to resist: turning the domestic chronicle into an exercise in complacent nostalgia, a naive idealization of childhood as a lost paradise. Against this tendency, the work of Alain Laboile stands as a testimony of another nature: the overflowing, dirty, wild one that pulses at the margins of organized life. His images are the record of an education unlike any other: that of six children growing up in an old house in southwestern France, without television or other screens. But be careful: this is not a romantic escape to an Arcadian world.

Laboile does not photograph the flight from civilization, but its suspension in a territory where time seems to have recovered another rhythm, closer to that of the seasons than to that of calendars.

Childhood, overprotection, ideological corsets, that paralyzing fear that has turned Western children into hostages of their own fears and the anxious projections of their parents. Idealism. Much is called into question. Here, in the French artist’s work, play is just play, and its only purpose is its own unfolding.

It bypasses nostalgia to provoke unease. The first step towards rethinking, from its foundations, the institution of childhood.

We spoke with him about it…

In your work, the distinction between reality and truth is clear; in fact, it is perhaps the latter that is transmitted. Why through photography and not another art form? How did you relate to this expressive form?

Reality is what surrounds me; truth is what escapes me and yet appears in the photograph. I didn’t choose photography to reveal truth, photography chose me because it allowed me to receive rather than construct.

Coming from sculpture, I was used to shaping matter. With photography, I let matter shape me. It’s an art of availability, of presence. The truth that emerges is not documentary, it’s emotional, instinctive, sometimes even accidental. And that’s precisely why I trust it.

– Stories or, rather, scenes around which time revolves…? What of this element in your work-time, but also narrative?

Time in my work is not linear. It’s circular, suspended, almost feral. Children live in a time without purpose, a time of pure experience. I slip into that rhythm.

I don’t build stories. I capture mythologies of the everyday. A gesture, a jump, a fall, a moment of silence… These are not narratives but fragments of eternity. My photographs don’t say beforr or after. They say here, now, always

– The choice of a palette implies a series of principles; let alone black and white photography. Why this form of contrast?

Black and white is not an aesthetic decision, it’s a way of speaking. Color describes. Black and white reveals.

It removes distraction, it sculpts the light, it brings the image closer to something essential, almost archetypal.

Perhaps it’s also the sculptor in me. I still carve, but now I carve with shadows.

– Situations, actions, events… to what extent do you plan your work with the camera? How do you choose which material to work with on each occasion?

I don’t plan. I observe. Life unfolds around me, chaotic, unpredictable, luminous and I follow it with my camera.

The only decision I make is to be there, to stay open, to let the world surprise me. As for the material I work with, it’s simple: whatever is at hand, whatever is alive, whatever resonates.

– Children… Why? And to what extent do they represent much more than what we assume of them, that is, their innocence? To what extent do they represent, for you, significant subjects beyond their corporeality?

Children are not symbols of innocence for me. They are forces of nature. They embody freedom, risk, imagination, wildness ; everything adulthood tends to tame. They are not “subjects” but presences. Through them, I photograph the human condition stripped of artifice. Their bodies, their gestures, their games speak a universal langage, one that predates culture.

– Your main influences, within and outside of photography?

My influences are scattered. In photography, I feel close to the rthe instinctive immediacy of street photographers.

Outside photography, my influences come from sculpture, from the land, from my own children, from the animals that inhabit our space, from the silence of rural life. Nature is my greatest teacher

– How do you consider your work has progressed from the beginning until now? Could one speak of maturation or rather of a sinuous evolution?

I wouldn’t call it maturation. That sounds too linear, too intentional. My evolution is sinuous, like a river that changes course depending on the stones it meets.

I’ve become more patient, perhaps more attentive. But the core remains the same: a desire to witness life without interfering with it.

– What comes next for you as an artist?

What comes next is simply life unfolding, and me trying to follow its rhythm. I don’t plan projects, I let them grow. That’s how my artpark La Tortue Volante emerged, naturally, as an extension of my work and my way of living.

Maybe new sculptures for the park, maybe new photographs, maybe something I haven’t imagined yet. I trust the path. It has always led me where I needed to go.