©Anne-Laure Autin’s Blood Line (cover)

This past September, I had the great pleasure of jurying, along with CFAP Director Hamidah Glasgow, the Center Forward Exhibition at the Center of Fine Art Photography in Colorado. I flew in for the opening and later stayed on to c0-teach the Artist Immersion Weekend. It was wonderful to connect with photographic artists in a deeper way, spending time reviewing work, but also making time to create new work. When I sat down with Anne-Laure Autin, a photographic artist from the Netherlands, I was immediately drawn to her new project, Blood Line, that speaks to the profound experience of losing a parent, but also the emotional toll that comes with hospitalization and saying goodbye. For this series, Anne-Laure moved the photograph into the 3rd dimension by tearing, puncturing, altering, and adding medical ephemera to the prints, elevating the visual narrative into something tangible and deeply felt emotions into something visceral.

Kris Graves Projects will be releasing a monograph of Blood Line in May 2017, but the book can be pre-ordered now with two options for purchase: a signed book and a book with print. Kris will be presenting the book at the AIPAD Fair in New York.

Anne-Laure Autin is an emerging fine-art photographer and mixed-media artist. Fascinated by the philosophical concepts of universality and relativism as a teenager, she studied theoretical mathematics and holds an MSc from the University of Leiden (NL). She is always inspired by contrasting juxtapositions, and embraces the duality of her search for truth and her love of human nature, where no logic is apparent. In her staged work, she seeks out the deepest, most candid and raw emotions from her subjects. Her sets are disarmingly simple so that the viewer senses true human connection. In reconciling authenticity and beauty, she makes conceptual work that is both soulful and highly intimate.

Autin’s work has been exhibited internationally, in the USA at the Corden Potts Gallery in San Francisco, at the Center for Fine Arts Photography in Colorado, Soho Photo Gallery, as well as in Canada, in the UK at the Brighton Photo Fringe, and at the Berlin Foto Biennale. Her images have been featured on LensCulture, Musée Magazine, L’ Oeil de la Photographie and Don’t Take Pictures. She was a Critical Mass finalist in 2016 as well as a BPF OPEN16 Solo finalist. Anne-Laure was born and raised in France and moved to the Netherlands when she was 13. She recently returned from a six year relocation in Western Canada with her British family and is based in the Netherlands again.

Blood Line 

Once your parents passed away, you realise you’re next in line. My father was diagnosed with terminal cancer at the tender age of 64. Blood Line investigates how his inescapable disease and death also affected my own life. I saw my father’s pain and felt my own. My subjects are my daughters, my flesh and blood, his descendants. He experienced, I processed, they embody. With this work I address how terminal illness turns our lives upside down and affects communication and identity. When I was with my dad, he and I knew his days were numbered. I was able to say things I might not have shared before, but I also found myself withholding private thoughts. My version of reality and truth shifted. Blood Line illustrates the ensuing coding of language and our morphing sense of Self.

Life as I knew it was radically redefined and my personal definition of a photograph evolved. In much of the work, I altered the surface of my pigment ink prints with the medical supplies that overtook our lives, such as gauze, suture thread, eosin…, even my own blood that I drew from my fingers. I cut the prints with scalpels and tore them by hand. By lineage, I am the literal link between my father and my daughters. Now I am also that link through the work of my hands. A year later he is gone, and when I am too, the photographs will still be there to connect us all.

©Anne-Laure Autin, Torn