Sara Imloul

Sara Imloul

Since 2008 she has developed a practice focused on symbolic and autobiographical photography by staging her contrasted black and white images born out of inner visions and memories.

Since her studies at the ETPA in Toulouse, Imloul has been using calotype, a process developed by Henri Fox Talbot in 1840 that allows a contact print to be made from a paper negative. Imloul edits each negative by hand, mixing drawings and collages with her photographic prints, manually composing her own unique story.

Contrary to digital manipulation, and instead of returning to the medium’s origins, Imloul’s black-and- white images are conceived as true theatrical pictures, seemingly straight out of the 19th century. Imloul has chosen slowness, the Arte Povera of photography.

A reflection on identity and the introspective dimension is at work here, with the expression of the “I” operating through play. Role-playing, mask-playing and staging games are thus brought together by the magic of photography. And the photographer invests in the tenuous gap that separates reconstitution and recollection, reality and representation. ImIouI conjures up an apparition, revealing an evanescent image that is expressed like a reminiscence. Such a practice is based on questioning the medium’s indexical power, which is capable of materialising thought and generating the fictional repetition of past events.

Through EXODES (2022-), Chez Moi 2020, Passages (2015-2018), Das Schloss (2014), Négatifs (2012) and Le Cirque Noir (2008-2011), she invents personal techniques in her studio that enable her to create her mysterious world of images using a process dating back to the earliest days of photography, the calotype: technique for obtaining a paper negative.

Conveying a theatrical sense of composition, these detailed scenographies, props and sets are arranged with a surveyor’s precision. They require meticulous preparation, built around texts and sketches. The exposure times are long, with no room left for improvisation. lmloul is, above all, looking for an image as close as possible to the threshold of her imagination. Having become pure plastic elements, the people close to her, whom she uses as models, adopt fixed attitudes and sometimes even emphatic gestures. The faces are hidden, the monstration of the bodies fragmented, the metonymy moving them into a blurred register with no vanishing point. Underlying enigma and latent tension are sovereign, designating a photograph experienced as a labyrinthine space where loss is combined with discovery.