Madeleine Morlet: I Promise I'll Never Forget

Madeleine Morlet: I Promise I’ll Never Forget by Aline SmithsonOctober 21, 2019

©Madeleine Morlet, After Long Silence (Appleton, Maine), 2019 28×36” Traditional Chromogenic Print

Madeleine Morlet‘s project I Promise I’ll Never Forget takes us on a narrative journey thought adolescence and time, through histories and memory and the the bliss of youth. This series speaks to the trying on of personas, of sun kissed faces and tangled limbs in scenarios that span the decades. As she states, “‘I Promise I’ll Never Forget’ is a love letter to youth, a memento written as I too face the precipice of adulthood. Here is a new vantage point, one in which I am nostalgic both for adolescence as it has been lived and motherhood as it is being lived, recognizing in both their brevity and poignancy. How daring it is to make such extravagant promises, knowing as we do, that memories are as fleeting as life itself.”

Madeleine Morlet is a photographer from London. She studied Classics and English at King’s College London and for almost a decade has worked across both video and stills with companies such as RidleyScott Associates, Vice, i-D and Somesuch. Her photography is cinematic, dark and deeply romantic (Romantics are often failed classicists).

Madeleine is the Features Editor for Teeth Magazine and teaches at Maine Media Workshops. She just been awarded an honorable mention for the 14th Julia Margaret Cameron Award and been written about on PDN.

©Madeleine Morlet, Blue Violets (Appleton, Maine), 2019 17.5×22” Traditional Chromogenic Print

I Promise I’ll Never Forget

‘I Promise I’ll Never Forget’ is a love letter to youth, a memento written at the precipice of adulthood. This dramatisation of adolescence serves to examine identity and personal relationships through theconstruction of imaginative narratives. ‘I Promise I’ll Never Forget’ holds a mirror to my own coming of age, as a foreigner and new mother, experiences that have been punctuated by a youthful ambition for friendship and concurrent feelings of isolation. These images have been made in mid-coast Maine, where recurring locations, costumes and local cast binds the series together while shattering any illusions that these scenarios are real. This very personal manifestation reflects on how our uncertain and self-conscious times are not met alone, but amongst our communities. Cinematic and at times unsettling, the images tap into a history of storytelling, acting as a fictional counterweight to my experience as I acknowledge the poignancy and brevity of youth. How daring it is to make such extravagant promises, knowing that memories are as fleeting as life itself.

All wardrobe and prop styling by Emily Seymour.