Magnetic Dolorès Marat, photographer of the “blue hour” | EUROtoday

Lhe music has “the blue note”, that indefinable second when the sound fades away to provide strategy to silence. But a silence marked by the echo of a melody, the resonance of a sense. Dolorès Marat is the photographer of the “blue hour”, this second of the day which isn’t but night time, nor fairly day. A second, too, populated by ghosts.

When we meet the artist due to the discharge of the ebook* devoted to him by Editions Delpire, one of many first questions we wish to ask him considerations exactly this. Why does she all the time stand on the fringe of the world, at this pivotal second that the favored adage describes as “between dog and wolf”? The reply she provides us is putting in its simplicity: “It’s just that I took most of my photos while I was working. I was at work during the day. A single mother, I had to boil the pot to feed my children. I could only take images in the morning when I went to work or in the evening when I came home,” she says, with a giant smile which however exhibits a touch of disappointment.

ALSO READ Meeting with Martin Parr: “I like not being where I am expected” His rationalization doesn’t detract from the poetry of his photographs. Nor to the magic of his universe crammed with nocturnal landscapes and evanescent silhouettes. Most of those pictures give the viewer the unusual sensation of standing on the brink of one thing, in the meanwhile when an occasion is about to happen that may change all the pieces.

Take this boat caught within the whirlpools, for instance. Is this a migrant boat able to sink? Or a rescue boat carrying passengers from a liner in issue to shore? “Neither.” They’re simply vacationers at Niagara Falls who take the float below the waterfall,” explains Dolorès Marat, trying delighted to have sowed hassle in our minds.

Dream world

Exhibited on the Rencontres d’Arles in 2023, then in South Korea in the beginning of 2024 and, at present, on the Sozzani** basis (Paris 18^e) on the event of a retrospective organized for her eightieth birthday, Dolorès Marat has for forty years created a powerful physique of labor solely composed of photographs by no means retouched or cropped. Images restoring a magical ambiance midway between dream and hallucination.

His photos provide a number of attainable readings. This girl happening the metro escalator: what mind-set is she in? Impossible to inform if she is gloomy or glad. “I don’t know it myself. I triggered my device as I was going to a medical appointment at Étoile station. Perhaps I projected onto her, without realizing it, the part of worry that I had then,” says Dolorès Marat.

In any case, this picture appears straight out of Journal from exterior by Annie Ernaux. It additionally featured prominently within the exhibition that the novelist, topped with the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2022, organized on the European House of Photography final spring.

Previously printed utilizing the Fresson course of – a direct charcoal print on albumen paper giving a robust texture to its colours –, now on Japanese paper by the Arlesian workshop SHL, these photos all inform a major episode within the lifetime of their writer. Do not cease on the seemingly trivial topics coated right here: behind this return from the occasion within the early morning, this automotive breakdown within the night time in New York, this nocturnal stroll on the banks of the Seine, lie usually overwhelming reminiscences.

The reality is that the lifetime of Dolorès Marat was not a protracted, quiet river. “I don’t have the first name Dolores for nothing,” she jokes. She was born on October 26, 1944 right into a modest household in northern France and spent the primary six years of her life in an orphanage. “Peasant mother, unknown father,” summed up her admission file.

Although she doesn’t want to discuss an excessive amount of about her troublesome childhood, she admits to having began working as a employee at 15 after which changing into a home employee. “My luck consisted of becoming the maid of Claude Froissard, a photographer from Sucy-en-Brie who very quickly detected in me the desire to take images. He taught me everything: from shooting technique to development. I will pay him eternal gratitude until my death,” she says, her eyes nonetheless clouded with emotion.

Magical local weather

After working in her studio, taking wedding ceremony and identification photographs, Dolorès Marat moved to Paris in 1963. It was there that she gave beginning to 2 youngsters. “I first worked as a printer for a street photographer then joined the lab of a fashion magazine where I produced the developments of all the published photos for almost thirty years,” she continues.

Of this web page of her life, spent at midnight revealing the photographs of others, from morning to night, she doesn’t preserve good reminiscences. “It must be said that the journalists I met in the elevator made me feel the weight of their contempt,” she says modestly. She thus remembers, nonetheless mortified, the reminiscence of that day when, as a result of it was discovered that she smelled of chemical compounds from the photographic laboratory, she was forbidden to take the elevator with the remainder of the workers; pressured to solely use the freight elevator.

It was after her divorce, in 1980, that Dolorès Marat started taking photographs once more for her. His first pictures seize the small world of the metro, the pale ambiance of the early hours of the day the place the crumpled faces nonetheless appear very sleepy. Very shortly, she additionally started to immortalize dinners with mates and journeys. It is at this second that she asserts her inimitable type: a tremor or reasonably a movement blur, as photographers say, which resembles a shiver.

“The first time I brought my slides in for enlargements, the dealer told me they were a failure,” she laughs looking back. This distinctive type earned her recognition within the mid-Nineties. Her work was then the topic of a primary exhibition in New York. Its viewers will proceed to develop.

Since devoting herself full time to her artwork, Dolorès Marat has traveled extensively to the 4 corners of the planet to file the lives of people that appear like her. “To show, without watering them down, the anguish and the great difficulty of living, but combated by the poetry that we are capable of projecting onto the world…” This, in keeping with his good friend the author Éric Reinhardt, is the ambition of the work of Dolorès Marat. We could not say it higher.

To Discover



Kangaroo of the day

Answer

*Dolores Marattexts by Magali Jauffret and Sarah Moon. Editions Delpire, 144 pages, €49.

**Exhibition on the Sozzani Foundation: 22, rue Marx Dormoy (Paris 18^e), till November 24. Retrospective organized by the Neuf Cinq Endowment Fund – Robert Delpire & Sarah Moon, in collaboration with the European House of Photography as a part of the PhotoDays pageant.