Laurent Laporte is a french photographer living since a few days in a van strolling the Basque Country. He work as a fashion and travel documentary photographer but the stuff that he prefer doing is just the in-between, when these two disciplines are slightly mixed together like the serie of portraits that he did about the fishermen of Sanur or the wrestlers in Senegal or even the rockabillys from Tokyo.
Space Ipsum
“Space Ipsum is a very different serie that I did when I spent a month on a boat on the Costa Brava in Spain.
One day I was developing some films that I shot in the middle of the Mediterranean sea and when I was editing it, I accidently zoomed in the water part of the picture and I saw that the reflections of the sunlight in the sea creates kind of stars and even constellations. I decided to go back on the boat with a digital camera and spend a few days waiting for the sunset and shot thousands of reflections. After editing them, I was quite happy with the result of all these fake astronomy pictures. I showed them to my friend Pierre Vanni, a famous french graphist and we thought about something to do with it. We ended up with a book of these pictures illustrated with astronauts quotes. Actually, the name Space Ipsum is an online tool developed by the Nasa to generate filler text based on a database of historical space quotes.”
“So, through the spellbinding aesthetic of the spatial conquest, the humanity phantasm, I tried to explore here one of the most essential theme about photography: the truth and the lie. What is the most important? The exact representation or the one that we always had in mind. The stars, even if we can admire them every night, stay for the most of us, unknown.
With these fake astonomic pictures, I harnessed this unknown notion which let the freedom to the viewer to project himself where he wants. I guess there is a connection and an attempt to revived our heart of child, when our imagination came before the truth.”
website: Laurent Laporte
Instagram: laurent.laporte
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