Danielle Voirin: Paris Blue Prints

Danielle Voirin: Paris Blue Prints by Sarah StankeyApril 11, 2016

Shadows © Danielle Voirin

Danielle Viorin‘s cyanotype prints remind the viewer of the past. While it is difficult to photograph a place as a visitor without creating pictures that most tourists make, Danielle’s images of Paris are unique. The cyanotype process creates an otherworldly feel to her images, and the soft focus creates a dream-like atmosphere.

Danielle Voirin was born in the Chicago suburbs, received a B.A. in psychology at DePaul and took photo classes at Columbia College, after which she moved to Paris, where she has lived and worked since 2003. Whatever the subject of her photography, both commissioned or self-assigned, her intentions are best summed up by this Arthur Miller quote, “I’m trying to create the poem from the evidence.”

Chandelier © Danielle Voirin

Paris Blue Prints

I wanted to slip back into that old dream, to escape into its soothing promises. To shift my focus away from the fear and worry of today’s tensions. The Paris dream was always there. I don’t remember when or why it started. I thought I must have lived here in another lifetime, but it doesn’t matter. It was a driving force. “I am here, and I want to go there.” When, where, or how, I didn’t quite know. I tried many different doors, and it was an unexpected one that pulled me in when I had stopped trying.

Years after having transformed that wish into real experience, I have started looking back, trying to recollect what I was imagining and visualizing all those years ago, when living in Paris was my favorite daydream, before I had to navigate the bureaucracy, the language and the recent traumas, which I could never have included in the fantasy.

Those dreamed projections are still here, in parallel, and intertwined. It’s a question of sight, of decision, of choosing what to see. What does it look like, the undercurrent I feel running through both my present and the palpable past of this city?