Eat Your Eyes

Yohanne Lamoulère

 2019 – Marseille

About this series

Yohanne Lamoulère photographs people who live in the communities in which she lives. Representing bodies in battered landscapes. Motionless and solar, they lie as best they can. They stage themselves because it’s vital to their survival. As they tell stories, they seize on those told about them. Some fictions are comfortable. You dive right in and make them your own. Those that don’t fit are twisted or rejected. Every encounter is a lie. One way or another, it can be tamed. On the wall, scraps of paper commemorate hundreds of confrontations. And what difference does it make? That’s the question Yohanne Lamoulère asks herself as she attempts to capture what she has taken from them and what they have given her: an image of their bodies. That’s what’s at stake here. Testing the distance. Take it or break it, as in boxing. Turn around to get a clearer view, then plunge into this mixed and abundant material. Images showing the other side of the story, questioning the sincerity of the documentary approach, and understanding what is at stake in the intimacy of these moments, when the eye is riveted on a reality that overwhelms. Léon Favier

Photographer: Yohanne Lamoulère
Nationality: French
Based in: Marseille, France
Website: www.yohannelamoulere.fr
Instagram: @yohannelamoulere

Yohanne Lamoulère was born in Nîmes in 1980. She graduated from the École nationale supérieure de la photographie d’Arles in 2004, after spending her adolescence in the Comoros, and now lives and works in Marseille.
A member of the Tendance Floue collective, her favorite themes are the outskirts of cities and insularity in all its protean forms.
She published Faux Bourgs with Editions Le Bec en l’air in 2018, a compilation of her work on the city of Marseille. She is also part of the Zirlib collective with director Mohamed El Khatib and is currently preparing her first film, L’œil Noir.