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• Untitled No. 16, 2001 © Chrystel Lebas
Dreams on paper
Chrystel Lebas graduated from the Royal College of Art in 1997. This, her first book, brings together six related bodies of work completed in the intervening period. She has used a variety of photographic tools and formats with long exposures of up to several hours to record what the eye cannot (or does not) see during night time. Some of the work takes the form of portraits: friends encouraged to doze off after being wined and dined; Lebas, herself, pictured in often abstract form during the night-long exposures of a camera set up by her bed. The largest body of work featured, Azure, was shown at the Photographers’ Gallery (the gallery now represents her work) in 2002. These nocturnal landscapes were made on a rotating-lens panoramic camera with exposure times of between two and six hours; the result is a representation of the land in time as its illumination moves from dusk into night and on towards dawn. Moving Landscapes also express the notion of time, again through long exposures, in this case using a moving pinhole camera and colour film. In Night 2 the pinhole camera remains stationary for the 2-4-hour twilight exposures and the resulting b&w images feature the familiar blend of soft and sharp detail produced the pinhole. The work is supported by two texts: one, Night, by Jean-Claude Lemagny, and the other exploring Uncovering the optical unconscious, by Deborah Schultz. As Schultz writes in her conclusion: ‘Lebas appears to put the camera in control. Whether the result of the camera moving or the effects of light changing, the image is liberated from the limits of the human eye. However, at the same time, the photographer retains her position of authority behind the viewfinder, exploring the camera’s capabilities to observe and record the immaterial and the passing of time’.
Time in space: photographs by Chrystel Lebas, co-published by Azure Publishing and The Photographers’ Gallery, £19.95, ISBN 0 954 6478 0 7.
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