30 Sep Persephone Michou, The Perfect Blue
Memory is the human ability to remember. It is not an objective record but a dynamic process of selecting and removing elements of reality, which over time are altered and weakened. The period of the pandemic and the confinement it imposed inevitably led to a review of both the inner self and our personal records. Flipping through family albums, one wonders if photography helps preserve memory or ultimately replaces it.
The Perfect Blue is a renegotiation with the past and the traumas it has left behind. The archaic technique of cyanotyping is here the means of recording and imprinting the photographs on paper, in the same way that childhood experiences are etched into the subconscious. At the same time, the abstract monochrome of blue removes the images from the realm of reality, while the subjects acquire an immaterial existence. Finally, this process of “re-photographing” my family archive is not only a product of nostalgia, but an exploration of the relationship between human memory and photography.