Homesick -How to Become a Ghost
France Dubois
2024 — Japan
About this series
In Japan, some people think of escaping when a house becomes a prison. By imposing their radical disappearance. Before they can take back the freedom they’ve been deprived of, they must inflict on their husbands a painful nostalgia for days gone by, which arouses regret and sorrow. As well as to have a little fun. In this series of self-portraits, France Dubois has been haunted by the macabre projects of the deceased in a traditional Japanese house, and she has placed their atonal or floating silhouettes everywhere like so many conversations and funeral games, where each appearance is a pretext for the beginning of a domestic novel.
Photographer: France Dubois
Nationality: Belgian
Based in: Brussels, Belgium
Website: francedubois.eu
Instagram: @francedubois
France Dubois unrelentingly explores spaces of intimacy; there is a small almost transparent border between dreams and reality, the visible and invisible, which stretches like a taut thread between the two universes, where it takes little for individuals to cross to the other side, into different worlds.
The photographer uses images of the vacillations in our lives to show our capacity to move from one state to the other. Taking subjects like adolescence, relationships with other people, absence, history or sickness she explores our ability to overcome our weaknesses and emerge stronger from them, like a continual new beginning. Passing is gentler surrounded by light, sickness becomes a work of art, melancholy transforms itself into pure energy, and the driver of creativity.
France Dubois’ strength lies in her minimalist photographic style which has a powerful aesthetic appeal. The characters in her photographs appear fused with their environment, as if nature has given them the strength to overcome these moments of self-doubt, to reengage, draw on nature, and regenerate, as symbols of rebirth. The universal history she weaves from her own, almost shameless standpoint, make her photographs an accurate and poetic reflection of our own inner lives.
Her work has been shown in Belgium (Recylart, Médiatine, Bozar, Hangar Photo Art Center) and abroad : New York Photo Festival, Kaunas Photo Festival (Lithuania), Galerie VU’ (Paris), Itinéraires des Photographes Voyageurs (Bordeaux – France), Les Photaumnales (Beauvais – France), Les Transphotographiques (Lille – France), AIAV (Yamaguchi – Japon), Photo Art Fair (London – UK), Fotofabrik BNL-Bxl (Berlin – Germany), Blue Star Contemporary (San Antonio – Texas).