Solitude of the elements
Photographer Michèle Bloch-Stuckens expresses loss, the emptiness that follows, and the reconstruction of the self through images. An almost blank page. Isabelle Cerboneschi
I have known photographer Michèle Bloch-Stuckens for years. We have worked together. Not much. A matter of circumstance, no doubt. Her world was one of abundance: abundance of flesh, colours, details, decor, sensuality. As if emptiness had no place in her images.
We met again during the scorching summer of 2017. She showed me her personal work. It was almost monochrome: a girl with white hair and white skin against a white background. Nothing or almost nothing else but a white daisy as a touch of extravagance. It was as if Michèle Bloch-Stuckens had washed her life clean, getting rid of everything except the essentials. I no longer recognised her photos. I no longer recognised her either.
She wanted to put on an exhibition with her images. I asked her if she would agree to reveal them in my magazine to illustrate an article on white hair. She said yes. I asked her to tell me about her series. At this point, I prefer to open quotation marks and let her speak for herself: what she says moves me because it is universal. It is her I hear. It is me too.
“I experienced a major upheaval in my life at the beginning of 2017. I had to say goodbye to things and people I was very attached to. The violence of this beginning plunged me into a great void, empty of everything – future, feelings, emotions. I was like anaesthetised, blissfully unaware of this frightening emptiness and the obligation to start all over again. I was experiencing great loneliness.
At the time, I didn’t really understand all this. I would have been unable to put it into words, so I didn’t quite understand why I was suddenly attracted to a style of photography that was very different from what I had been doing up until then, namely powerful, highly sophisticated, sensual women in rather busy settings.
Now I dreamt of white, purity and sobriety. A complete turnaround.”
“Through the images I created, beyond the creative joy and novelty, I felt that this emptiness that still weighed heavily on me was, deep down, a source of immense freedom. An agonising and terrifying freedom, but freedom nonetheless.
During the photo shoot, with a simple movement of her head, my model made her hair fly. In that breath, that little flutter, I felt all the hope I had been missing.
Air, the most intangible of all things, reminded me that life is movement.
La Solitude des Eléments is a series of photographs divided into four sections, some of which you can see here from the first part: Air. I extrapolate and play with the characteristics of each of the four elements, freely and personally interpreting my journey through them.”
