synopsis
Text by Gilou Le Gruiec
To feel you are on the edge of a world where you can discard the cumbersome trappings that once overloaded your memory, so you can get into that world more easily. This is how I felt when I first discovered Letizia Le Fur’s photographs. As though I had finally fulfilled a vague desire and found the answer to my desperate and nearly life-long quest to be simply filled with wonder.
Like all encounters that leave a lasting impression and help you grow, the all too rare encounter with beauty often meets one’s expectations. Mine were fulfilled by my encounter with Letizia Le Fur’s pictures. Their beauty is as exuberant in form as in the infectious enthusiasm that they arouse, overflowing with life, ideas and desires, unrestrained and without limits. I suddenly felt light, joyful and confident once again in the capacity of photographs to take me to that place on the other side of the wall that infuriatingly separates the representation of reality from the appeal for fiction.
Boldly following the path of fiction, Letizia Le Fur frees herself - and us too - from the accepted references of a form of realism which often proves to be poorer in comparison to the broad horizons that dreams offer. It is such a joy to let go of everything we know and to be swept away by a story that shakes up our senses and evokes a host of sensorial memories which, paradoxically, make us more aware of a given reality. Indeed, taking in the universe that Letizia Le Fur has entitled Métamorphoses, in which I completely and joyfully lost myself, made me feel the fragility of Man, the passing of time and the vanity of all conquests. I reconnected with something lost but not forgotten, a snippet of conscience of a time when Man did not yet presume to be the only master here on Earth. Such memories, pervasive and diffuse yet deeply ingrained in us, seem to be as much those of our own childhood as those of the childhood of a humankind that walked this Earth thousands of years ago and invented stories, legends and myths to ward off fear, the inexplicable, the cruel beauty of birth that inexorably leads to death and to fickle, fleeting and absolute love. Myths that we cling on to, as if our eyes alone could not find the answers. Through this body of work we reconnect with the cosmogony of those who believe that a bull is a god or that a dog has the power to change the world.
Letizia Le Fur embraces the photographic medium and slips away, delightfully taking the best of what photography has to offer with her. She keeps only the substance of its core in order to transform, disobey and rework it dot by dot, leaf by leaf, stone by stone, enhancing colours and thereby returning to her first love which is painting. Letizia Le Fur’s meticulous way of recomposing pictures comes from a research method that she developed early on. It’s the only means she has to devote herself to a narrative that falls within the rare and remarkable domain of pure poetry. Imagination rules without compromise, taking us, somewhat dazed, to a time and space where dreams are – really - within view. Nothing seems real in Letizia Le Fur’s pictures, yet we paradoxically see our fundamental connection to the cosmos and to nature’s powerful glory in them. In other words, her pictures take us back to the essentials, to the simplest things in the world: the sea, the earth, the sky…
Whilst trees and plants seem to be firmly rooted and to feed copiously on the elements, the beings resemble evanescent ghosts. They look more like apparitions than actual beings and make you wonder if they are perhaps fleeing the History of centuries to come. By showing themselves, they hide and by hiding, they show themselves. Like fleeting beings, they’re not trying to control the elements. Rather they seem to pass through them or even to be passed through by them. Perhaps behind the beauty of these bodies there is a vague fear, a fragility, the hope that they themselves can still become part of the elements.
The photographer’s work takes us back to all there is to love when the power of the mind awakens the imagination and makes us more aware and mindful about the world surrounding us. This is not a recollection nor a vain attempt to transcribe it. We are dealing with the kind of memory shared by all the people on Earth, a memory that was built on myths, legends and stories.
Long a reader of the Classics, Letizia Le Fur knows how imagination can make us more aware of reality. She takes a prominent contemporary theme and links it to mythology. Holding a mirror up to us, she shows us the almost unbearable image of all that we have lost along the way. And while we must always affirm that photography is a means of documentation, in this instance it simply and humbly documents life. Nowadays, facing the destruction of our planet, we shout and flail our arms like string puppets. Unlike many of her contemporaries who are almost obsessional about facts, through a single fictional pirouette Letizia Le Fur reminds us with light and elegant brushstrokes that every myth brings us back to humanity’s history. And so, like Quetzalcoatl biting his own tail, the present leads us back to mythology and mythology leads us back to the present.
Just as the Aboriginal Australians recount the creation and transformation of the world through songs, so did Ovid in his foundational text. From the very title they share, Métamorphoses, I defend without hesitation the link between Ovid and Letizia’s unique poetic narratives. Indeed, they both show us a way to rediscover the world through another open window.
When I closed this book, I wondered what has become of all the creatures that once populated our forests.
photos of the book
technical information
published by Rue du Bouquet
2022
120 pages
dimensions : 23 x 32 cm
800 copies (including 200 in korean)
2022
120 pages
dimensions : 23 x 32 cm
800 copies (including 200 in korean)
about Letizia Le Fur
Letizia Le Fur grew up in Seine-Saint-Denis. A graduate of the Tours School of Fine Arts in 1998, Letizia Le Fur was initially trained in painting. Encouraged by the artist and teacher Valérie Belin, she quickly directed her aesthetic quest towards photography.
Winner of the Paris Je t'aime x Photodays Prize (2023-24), the BNF Grand Order (2022), the Leica/Alpine Prize (2019) and the MEP Fenêtres Ouverts Prize (2020), she is also chosen as a resident by the Planches Contact festival in Deauville 2020, by the Incadaques festival 2021 and by the Vichy Portrait(s) festival in 2023.
Nominated for the Niepce Prize in 2022.
His work is the subject of collective and personal exhibitions, as well as publications.
His books are published by the publishing houses Rue du Bouquet, Filigranes and RVB Books.
Letizia Le Fur's work, constantly navigating between reality and fiction, explores the different fields of representation of beauty.
From his studies emerges the knowledge of the history of art, the mastery of light, the attention to color. This very particular color, which the photographer works like a painter, in small touches. And, like a painter mixes colors on his palette, Letizia Le Fur isolates and transforms, corrects, adds, exalts the tones, amplifies them to transcend reality and create this sensation of an unreal world, perched between the fantastic and the dream. Her quest for harmony and beauty, like the practice of a cult, in opposition to ugliness and the inappropriate, is liberated and removed from the codes in force, unexpected, absolute, sometimes secret.
In parallel with her artistic work, Letizia Le Fur has collaborated for more than 20 years with major brands (Air France, Belmond, Barrière, Ruinart, Perrier Jouët, Château Canon, etc.) and with the press (AD, New York Times , Grazia, Voyageurs du Monde, Les Echos…)
She has also been a Leica ambassador since 2019.
buy / find the book
more information
book in my collection
published by Rue du Bouquet
2022 (1st edition)
800 copies
2022 (1st edition)
800 copies