Haven her body was | Warren, Lightjet, 168 x 208, 2011

In a recent interview, London-based French photographer Noemie Goudal told Yatzer, “I don’t think my pictures invite anyone into a fantasy world but rather a place made from the real that questions the fantasies, desires, and fragility of the viewer.” Goudal’s photographs overlay portals into natural worlds over post-industrial ruins and infuse mystical atmospheres into bleak, lifeless spaces, hopelessly tangling the natural and the manmade, the real and the fictional. More after the break.

Wind, Color Photograph, 111 x 140 cm, 2008

Les Amants (Promenade), Color Photograph, 111 x 140 cm, 2009

Les Amants (Jetée), Color Photograph, 168 x 190 cm and 111 x 125 cm, 2009

In Goudal’s photographs, the weathered barn and the abandoned cellar suddenly tell new stories, shedding their more innate expressions as ghostly, forgotten spaces and taking on the imaginative identities of Goudal’s trompe l’oeil illusions. Goudal visibly stages scenes from which viewers can sift out their own desires and fears.

Les Amants (Cascade), Color Photograph, 168 x 208 cm, 2009

Flood, Color Photograph, 111 x 140 cm, 2008

Details of the artistic process are left deliberately exposed; light fixtures and white curtains become casual elements of composition, and the figures and objects in the foregrounds never hide their purpose as props. In essence, the illusions constructed here never fully depart into full-blown fantasy. As Goudal’s interview reveals, these photographs never abandon their place in the material world, challenging us not to retreat into the fictional but to find escape in the world we know.

Haven her body was | Warren, Lightjet, 168 x 208, 2011

[All photos © Noemie Goudal]

by Kelly Chan

posted in Money Shot

tagged Art, Fantasy, illusion, photography, ruin porn, space, Trompe l'oeil

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