“I don’t want to be human,” says the young boy in Selma Lagerlöf’s classic saga, The Wonderful Adventures of Nils (1906-7; 1913). Nils is a wild child. He likes to hunt and make mischief. And when he catches a gnome one day, he becomes more than a reflection of the wilderness in human form. He finds the creature in himself, and through that creature, he discovers the strange, surreal world he’s been living in all along.
Alain Laboile’s series Réflexion Autour du Bassin takes us back to that creature existence that one knows only as a child—back to those wild, otherworldly dramas that only unfold near ponds where children play. In these photographs, children ride their trikes across the sky, leap whole forests, and grow branches right out of their hands. Who would ever want to be human if being human meant the loss of such play?
ALAIN LABOILE
Mon travail photographique, démarré en 2006 est principalement axé sur la documentation en noir et blanc de la vie quotidienne de ma famille nombreuse dans la campagne Bordelaise.
La série Réflexion autour du bassin est une oeuvre parallèle, initiée presque accidentellement. Elle résulte d’une prise de vue banale sur la surface du bassin naturel creusé en famille dans notre jardin. J’ai immédiatement été séduit par le reflet généré. L’arrière-plan disparaissait, remplacé par le ciel, des distorsions se créaient, conférant aux images une dimension onirique. Une scène anodine prenait alors une tout autre dimension.
Nous vivons dans un lieu isolé, assez sauvage, les enfants évoluent en osmose avec la nature environnante. Notre jardin est un immense terrain de jeux, jonché d’éléments propices aux élans créatifs: Végétaux, outils, sculptures et structures métalliques . . . autant de possibilités de s’inventer des mondes fictifs.
Mes enfants élaborent de petites saynètes, se parent de costumes, s’accessoirisent avec ce qu’ils ont sous la main et laissent libre cours à leur imaginaire.
C’est cet univers fantasmagorique issu de la fantaisie enfantine que mes reflets illustrent.
Volontairement non narratifs afin de laisser toute liberté d’interprétation au spectateur, ils vont néanmoins titiller la petite flamme d’enfance qui sommeille en chacun de nous et en ravive un instant la lueur.
My photographic work, begun in 2006, is primarily centered on black and white documentation of my large family in the Bordeaux countryside.
The series Reflection around the Pond is a parallel work, begun almost accidentally. It is the result of an ordinary angling of the camera onto the surface of a natural pond that we dug as a family in our garden. I was immediately attracted by the reflection in generated. The background disappeared, replaced by the sky, and distortions were created that gave the images a dream-like quality. Thus an ordinary scene took on another dimension.
We live in an isolated place, rather wild, where children evolve in osmosis with the nature around them. Our garden is an immense playground, covered with elements conducive to fits of inspiration: plants, tools, sculptures and metallic structures . . . and as many possibilities to create fictive worlds.
My children think up little plays, put on costumes, accessorize with what they have on hand and let their imaginations run wild.
It is this phantasmagoric universe that springs from the child’s imagination that my reflections illustrate.
Purposefully non-narrative in nature so as to leave it up to the spectator to decide, they will nevertheless stir that little flame of childhood that sleeps in each one of us and momentarily revive its glow.
Translations © Lusia Zaitseva, PhD candidate in comparative literature at Harvard University