Photography: "A bleak society that has lost meaning ..."

"This new book The New Life, La Vie Nouvelle, (Twin Palms Publishers, October 2005) ... features a series of fifty photographs by French photographer Lise Sarfati. The photographs were taken in cities like Austin (Texas), Asheville (North Carolina), Portland (Oregon), Berkeley, Oakland and Los Angeles (California), New Orleans (Louisiana) and some small towns in Georgia.

"In each of these portraits, Lise Sarfati dramatizes the complexity of adolescent identity : within unfamiliar territory - both emotionally and physically - where the simplest of feelings become exalted and everything is lived with an intensity that adults will never again be able to feel. We are talking here of a kind of parallel reality, an interstitial territory which doesn't understand geographical spaces or political systems, which no longer belongs either to a completely real reality or to a consciously conceived fiction, but rather finds itself fed by its own rituals and codes of behaviour, where the dividing line between good and bad, happiness and sadness, innocence and perversity or reality and fantasy is extensively blurred."
F. Javier Panera

Source: Lise Sarfati's website.

"After the end of the soviet empire marked by the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, Sarfati started work on various projects in Russia, photographing there almost exclusively for the next 9 years. This work formed the basis of her first monograph, 'Acta Est', Latin meaning 'it's over' or 'the play is done'. Her pictures show with small areas of Russian cities, exteriors and interiors, viewed frontally in colour with an often brutal intensity, remarkable for their emptiness. Towards the end of the work we also see some of the people she has photographed, who seem to be mainly dysfunctional families, trans-sexuals and the mentally ill. It is powerful work and provides a bleak view of a society that appears to have lost its meaning."

Source: About.com - Lise Sarfati