A chat with Camille Lévêque

Camille Lévêque is a French photographer and founder of one our favourite photo collectives LIVE WILD, her thought-provoking series DADS was featured with us back in Issue 12. Read on for a conversation on Camille's projects, inspirations, methods and a snippet of advice for aspiring photographers.

Hi Camille! Would you tell us about yourself?

I am working as a freelance visual artist. I was born and raised in France and have been spending my time between France and the US for the past 6 years. I am self-taught in photography and started as a photojournalist when I was 20 years old. I am also the founder and member of an art collective and run a publishing house with my sister.

I’ve been traveling on and off for the past 12 years and worked and lived in several countries. My main tool is photography though I work with various mediums.

How and why did you get into photography?

I can’t quite remember how I got in photography. It was during high-school, I was in the Literature and Fine Arts class and I started leaning towards photography as a medium. My older sister was doing some photography and my mom used to give us all little disposable cameras on holidays so it wasn’t completely unknown for me, but I began to take it more seriously and use it in class. I graduated from art section in high-school with a photo based project. Then I started to travel right after graduation and cameras became indispensable. I have since been going back and forth between photography, illustration, sculpture and performances to ﬁnally settle down for photography two years ago, once in for all.

Your work ‘Dads’ was featured with us in Issue 12, a project about the loss / missing of a father ﬁgure, why did you choose to create such an interesting and meaningful project?

This project is the result of personal history through a universal story.

I was aiming to create a visual discomfort by recreating in a way, pictures I grew up with. They could have been thrown away but remained in the albums, either torn up or cut out which I’ve always found to be quite a powerful statement. As if this faceless form was illustrating our education and shaping our identity.As if we we going to ignore, to forget this gap in our family story and had forever to visualise its existence.

I thought it would be relevant to ironically use photography to convey absence - a media often, and almost automatically used to reframe memory.

The whole point of the project was to maintain the idea of a ‘hole’ in the picture, symbolizing the hole in the family. Using pictures of a family without a dad on the picture was not even an option. It had to be a photo in which the father was indeed present, and then remove him -partially- to leave a faceless persona in the frame. I wanted to create an awkward visual statement in which one couldn’t ignore the missing of someone. It wouldn’t work in a series in which, for example the mother and children are posing and the father is taking the picture because in this scenario there is room for doubt.

In my series I want to emphasize the emptiness in the family though an actual (partial) presence. By materializing the absence one is undeniably transforming it into an actual physical form. ‘Dads’ is a blunt testimony of absence, a disturbing hole in the most powerful piece of evidence.

The photographs within the project ‘Dads’ seem quite old, were they archival images or did you recreate certain scenarios? Would you give us a bit of background on the process of creating the images?

All the photographs I used for ‘Dads’ are images I bought in a ﬂea market for my collection of old family albums. I worked on these archival images that seemed to be from the 70’s/80’s and modiﬁed them in order to remove the father from the pictures while keeping the hint that he should have been there in the ﬁrst place. I had a couple of family photos from personal archive but decided to only use pictures from families I didn’t know as it would mean something more universal. That was in 2014. In 2015 I printed these modiﬁed images. Wanting to create another layer of depth to the project, I placed these images in staged scenery.

By photographing these modiﬁed pictures I was giving them a new-found echo in a setting wavering between fantasy and reality. These pictures had to exist in a new dimension in which they were surrounded by my belongings, muddling up the truth and the lies whether it was in the content or in the setting. Pictures that had never existed in my past where brought to light in this artiﬁcial new reality questioning the place memory was taking in the process of acquiring my identity.

You use both digital and ﬁlm camera’s in your work, do you prefer a certain type of medium for particular shoots?

I do actually. My approach of photography is radically different between digital and analog. In digital I shoot like a mental and often have to dig through 70 pictures of the same thing to pick the perfect one. I play a lot in digital and learn thanks to it. I take the same pictures with different settings and compare the light, the sharpness, the colors then I memorize the combinations of my favorite photo and try them later with ﬁlm. Digital allows you to shoot more freely, to try things and modify your way of shooting instantly, it also gives you the opportunity to see the result right away which, for commissioned work for example avoids bad surprises.

Everything I do in a studio will be done with a digital camera. When I travel I use both and try to do more ﬁlm as I like it better, it looks better and has something more ‘romantic’ to it that suits travel pictures well. Every time I shoot the same picture in ﬁlm and then digital I ﬁnd out that I like the ﬁlm one better, but I sometimes use digital as a back up. Also, my ﬁlm cameras are considerably smaller than the digitals so it’s always somewhere near me, which explains why most of my ‘random’ shoots are made in ﬁlm. I would like to shoot more in ﬁlm but it also is a budget issue, ﬁlm is more expensive and I kind of keep it for special occasions.

Throughout your work you do a lot of travelling, how do you choose your destinations?

It depends, sometimes I am going somewhere to see someone, sometimes I move for work, or I just want to visit a place. My last large trip was with my spouse and a close friend and we drove from Los Angeles to New-York. I was in Finland in January for my birthday and just came back from Georgia and Armenia where I was visiting friends and making work plans with a collaborator from the collective I founded. I’m hoping to keep traveling more and more, hopefully for commissioned works.

The subjects in your projects such as ‘The Odyssey’ are so vast and different, what elements do you looks for when capturing these moments?

There are several themes that I am drawn to but pretty much anything interest me. I like to combine photographs of things that triggered my curiosity as well as portraits or places that I found beautiful. I like to narrate a story with varied elements and atmosphere. Some things just stand out in a room and seem like the perfect subject for a photography.

Your work is subject to both black & white and colour, what made you choose to work with both and is there a speciﬁc advantage to working with one for a certain project rather than another?

I started working in black and white in 2004 and for several years this is all I did, I couldn’t even consider working in color. Then slowly color made its way to me and I mostly did that for a couple years. I’ve only been mixing both for a few month and separate works in black and white from works in color in terms of atmosphere. Black and white already confers an eerie, spooky atmosphere to photographs I think, so I tend to use it for projects in which I want to emphasize this feeling.

So, what are your plans for the future?

My sister and I are going to release this year the book ‘Dads’ with my project and her poems working in echoes around the theme of the father ﬁgure. I am working for the collective on daily basis and have several project on my own. Later this year I would like to move to the US permanently and start several long term photo project there, especially in Oakland and Detroit.

Lastly, is there any advice you would give to aspiring photographers that are starting their careers?

Being visible on or ofﬂine is deﬁnitely indispensable. Photographers have a very strong community and it is primordial to be part of it in order to get exposure, feedback, advice and support. I believe it is important to try diverse type of work and try to rejuvenate ones work. Having a signature in photography is very hard and it is one of the keys to success I think, but I feel like many photographers mistake having a signature with being conﬁned in a particular style. In those cases, the work of a photographer often ends up looking like a caricature of his/her former works. It is always rewarding to try new things and reach for varied topics and approaches.

It is also important to establish strong connections with professionals of the area and keep people updated with your work and projects.