BEHIND THE SCENES
A tiger in a cage, a striped circus big-top, a woman in round glasses and bell-shaped hat behind a camera – stolen moments during the filming of “Mississippi One”, written and directed by Sarah Moon. At the time, Delphine Warin had been practicing photography for a few years, having learned the rules of the art in New York at the famous International Center of Photography. On her return to Paris, she became Sarah Moon’s assistant, learning such essentials as following the flight of a storm of confetti, and/or the rolling trajectory of a child’s hoop. Her movie-set photographs contain emptiness, anxiety, restlessness, concern, empty sidewalks, a car windshield broken into a million slivers, busy cameramen under leaden skies…
After “Mississippi One” came “Circus”, another Sarah Moon film, and another series of photographs taken on the set, this time in black and white, resembling waking dreams.
The shooting of a film is a story broken down into precious hours, minutes, seconds. Time is not the photographer’s adversary but his or her accomplice. An image is snapped in a quarter second but has been maturing in the photographer’s imagination for a long time beforehand. Set photographer, documentarist, portraitist, Delphine Warin gets along with time, knows how to tame it. Positioned behind her camera she waits, for expressions to calm down, bodies to relax, the story to begin.
The first story she told was one of travesty. It wasn’t the movies but still a question of make- up and role-playing. Then came the story of the projectionists. The men who deliver the reels of dreams in 24 images per second. She captured them in their projectionists’ cabins, these creators of light in obscurity. Then came the actors, photographed for the French dailies: Le Monde, Liberation, the news magazine L’Express. Jean-Pierre Bacri, unshaven surly ogre; Yolande Moreau, wide-eyed with the desire to live and understand; Isabelle Carré, evanescent, sensual, shy. Role playing yet again, in the eye of the photographer who seems to breath in unison with her subjects. Steal an expression, give back an image, rewind the film with circumstantial complicity—nothing is easier, nothing is more arduous.
Sometimes Delphine Warin likes to complicate matters, with the portraits of masked children, of blind mothers. How does one photograph the absence of expression, render visible that which is concealed? Quite a challenge in these cases to capture a person’s interior light, their aura. Yet the images of the masked children vibrate, take up space, straight as rods, and more grown-up after the experience of “I am another”. The blind mothers are all curves and bending, their hands are their eyes, caressing their child, saying with their fingertips what blind pupils can no longer express. Very precisely framed, the mothers and their children are a maternal absolute, an animal symbiosis of bodies and odours, captured by these photographs that are tactile, quasi-organic.
In yet another series, entitled “Liens (Bonds)”, Delphine Warin photographs couples, of friends, lovers, and again it’s a story of close contact, proximity, the exchange of fluids, creating a veil of gentleness exuding off the image, a three-dimensional trompe l’oeil.
Delphine Warin has frequent recourse to polaroids, the photograph one must delicately pull apart for it to reveal itself. Emulsion, effusion, the velvety polaroid texture is already a caress. The nuances of gray are infinite, spreading out in chromatic scales, treasures of sentiment that overflow the frame.
Delphine Warin practices photography like an extended hand.
Natasha Wolinski