Coline Le Moing's "A s'y perdre"

"I'm Coline, 20 years old from France. I discover three years before the world of analog photography during my courses on Art school

This series of photography called "A s'y perdre", that's mean to get lost in French, is a series of cyanotype. Cyanotype is an old photography process and you can play with the sensible surfaces of your image. It's a balance between the image and the process.

This technique seems to be reluctant to the modernity, to the contemporary world but I thinks you can use it in a new way of modernity

This series of cyanotype is realized on a base of analog pictures that I was taken in the Drâa Valley in Morocco in 2019. This process so different from digital photography allows a real questioning about photography's standards. Morocco is also a country and a population very stadardized and all the culture and population is rythmed by the religion, values et standards. This photography work try to highlight this population.This series is the result of an immersion in another reality of mine.

Taking picture of a territory, of a population, report a space at a precise moment. During this trip i meet a lot of people because I was hitchhiking everyday without a itinarary, I was sleeping on local family's house, working in different places for a couple of days. I have a real interest for meeting people. On other projects I work with prisoners , with homeless and unknown people from different social classes."

See more of Coline's work on instagram at @colinelemoing

A/A: When did you first become involved with photography?

CL: I grew up in an artistic family , my parents are painters and they gave me my first camera when I was thirteen. I started doing portrait photography when I was fifteen, once I had saved enough money to buy a camera of my own. During my art studies I started to discover the world of analog, and my studies allowed me to develop by myself, to try new things with cyanotype and with other experimental techniques.

A/A: What got you interested in alternative processes?

CL: I loved the fact that you can always try something new with the processes. I feel like there are no creative limits. Alternative processes require a whole body investment, this practice needs all of your attention and curiosity. I don’t believe mistakes are a part of digital photography, everything needs to be clean and perfect. If anything , alternative processes encourage mistakes and therefore always yield an interesting result. Additionally, this practice is a perfect balance between the image and the process, the form and content of your image. Photographic standards are constantly being pushed beyond their limits.

A/A: Do you have a theme to your work?

CL: I work a lot with the idea of wandering and meeting people, my own sense of wonder, or someone else’s. First, I started to get along with a multiple homeless people in my city in France and was drawn to learning about their diverse life experiences. After that I started to travel alone and that made a big difference in how I approached my work. When you are alone you start to just be lost, be open to meeting new people more than before. I started to take pictures of my adventures and wanderings. This series of cyanotype were taken during my month of discovering southern Morocco, when I didn't know where I was going to sleep from day to day. For this series I set out to photograph the locals and their landscapes, to capture a unique moment in space and time.

A/A: What is next for you photographically?

CL: I want to try a lot of things; pinhole camera, Van Dyck’s print, camera obscura to name a few…

But I have two goals for this year ; obtain my art diploma, and succeed in the entrance exam to a competitive photography school, which I hope to attend next year.