Estelle Lagarde

Estelle Lagarde makes photographs in neglected places – château, hospital, houses set for demolition. This is not the poetry of ruins that attracts this young woman, but the fact that these places charged with the presence of their former tenants are sanctuaries conducive to the evocation of vanished beings. Estelle Lagarde has lost his companion, struck down with cancer. Her first two series of photographs, “Dame des Songes” (2006) (Queen of Dreams), and “Contes sauvages” (2007) (Wild Tales) evoke bereavement and an attempt to come back into the world of the living. She tames the unbearable through beauty. Estelle Lagarde, architect, features ghostly, masked characters, women in evening dress who wander between two realities, that of the dead and ours. In “Hôpital” (2007-2008) (Hospital), the spectra are being replaced by beings of flesh and blood. Her allegories reveal the fears and deprivation felt in hospitals: the feeling of being dispossessed of oneself. Supported by a great mastery in directing, this photographer materializes, with a cold humor, close to anger, the patients’ disarray and the return to childhood, which is, for some of them, the ultimate escape.

Luc Desbenoit for Télérama, n° 3089