Christian Caujolle Text for In the Shadow of Things by Léonie Hampton
Foam Museum Exhibition Pamphlet - 2009
See installation shots here

It is more a visit, more an invitation to a visit, than a description. It is more a space, closed and at the same time open, made of light rather than from the transcription of the space that you pass through or occupy − a space which draws the eye before it even radiates vibrations to the senses. It isn’t functional, practical or social. It presents itself simply as a receptacle for plants, bodies, animals, objects, people and clothing that the frame links together without really defining its function. Space that is floating and at the same time very real, in which the emotions organise the tension between fiction and reality, dream, nostalgia, the passage of time and experience, sometimes the difficult experience of an unusual situation.

It is a simple, obvious and eminently complex story. It is the story of Léonie Hampton and her family, which is in a very unusual situation as the mother is afflicted by a strange condition, difficult to understand, which prompts her to obsessively put things into the most perfect order possible, then suddenly to return them back to a state of disorder, herself being the only one to know and to invent the underlying logic. It is a logic of chaos, of anguish, experienced everyday by the bodies that live and express these feelings, highlighting the troubling presence of her young brother, in full adolescence. It is the result of Léonie Hampton’s visits to her family, of her apprehensions and of her little pleasures, of her uncertainties in a world that seems to float and escape, unable to find any stability, but then lands back on its feet, inexplicably, while you quietly fold the day’s washing. And, close by, the accumulation of papers creates disorder, an eerie protection and reassuring labyrinth, but one without end, somewhere. Time settles into a rhythm that is no longer that of the clock, of sequentiality. It acquires its own internal logic that is sometimes gentle and at other times disturbing, and it manages to organise the somewhat unstable basis of this universe, where strangeness quickly makes room for the possibility of construction.

We will not come to know a great deal about this family, to which we are complete strangers, and this is hardly important, as it simply becomes the framework, indispensable to the artist, for our interaction with another world. It is the matter, it will never be the “subject”. All the less so because it is in the perpetual evolution of things, in the comings, the goings, the decision to pursue, the personal and artistic necessity to take things “in progress” (not only a “work in progress”, but a “situation in progress”) that everything plays out.

It is always very tempting, when faced with a work that diverts and actually refuses classification, to compare it with works that predate it or which exist in the same era. One is therefore heavily tempted, all the more so because the work is born from the English documentary tradition, to think that Léonie Hampton is building on what, in a more abrasive manner, the first works of Nick Waplington on the neighbours of his parents (also a way of speaking about his own family) brought to the social approach or that she is suggesting a variant to Richard Billingham’s direct and disturbing portrayal of the breakdown of his father.

Both remain, with undeniable sincerity, spectacular in refusing the contradiction between private and public, a wild willingness to escape conventions, dates and references; yet their call, which also knows how to link pain and humour, in the end has nothing to do with the subject, or the process, of Léonie Hampton. While they affirm, she raises questions. While they do everything to emphasise, she merely sketches. While they choose to be harsh and direct, aiming at revelation by evasion, she accepts the situation, lets herself be forgotten, while remaining incredibly present, indispensable, as this world, without her, is simply inaccessible to us.

And in this way she escapes another convention – or fashion, already obsolete elsewhere – of recent years, which has seen repetition to the point of nausea, the vacuity of works, navel-gazing, egoistic, bordering on autism, by essentially female photographers who have attached themselves to the personal “surbanalism” of the everyday life of artists, to “nothing” but an exacerbated “I” with which we in the end have little to do. Léonie Hampton, composing, with a delicate modesty of tonality, halftone music sometimes injected with painful stridence, stands in contrast to these narcissistic practices, which reveal little more than an auto-analysis that is doomed to fail. Léonie Hampton breaths in time with the very rhythm of what she photographs, without a formal plan, out of pure vital necessity.

It is here that the formal, aesthetic relevance intervenes, which is essential in all its subtlety. It is characterised firstly by the fact that, sensitively, and without any approach being privileged, the relationships between the images weave together to compose, much more than a panorama of a situation, a questioning of the place of she who reports on it and of the position of the viewer. Delicately, Léonie Hampton succeeds in avoiding our becoming, at any moment, voyeurs of her family. No uneasiness, therefore, simply feelings. It is the reversing, at the exact moment when photography’s time seems to come to an end and where we are caught up in the crazy spiral of the image in all its meanings, in the fundamentals of photography, that Léonie Hampton achieves this little miracle: she writes with light. And the world inscribes itself on her film, as in the early age of the “heliographic image”. Without nostalgia, however, without any subject other than the proof of the moment that makes a lit, indoor greenhouse sparkle like a fairytale universe, at the same time desirable and possibly disturbing, and, seen close up, makes the deep red of plant matter acquire the same sensuality, yet different, as that of the skin of a sleeping adolescent when, vibrating, the rays of light mark out a landscape on the wrinkled skin of the father.

This is how colour takes on all its meaning. A colour without any stridence, a restrained, deep, organic colour from which the world seems to draw its own material so that the eye can glide there, curl up there, even if it encounters irritating surprises, whilst everything seems to be very nicely in place.

So what is it all about really? It is simply about a key providing access to a universe. About preventing us from becoming blind and indifferent, about leaving our senses on alert. About the simple, generous gift to a world that is capable of unfolding itself as soon as we know how to attach ourselves to it, that is to say, give it our attention.


Christian Caujolle
April-July 2009

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