In Colette Pourroy’s journey, introspection and artistic exploration are intimately connected. Over time her personal writing has come to impose itself as an artistic statement where photography is the true language for reproducing the real just as much the imagined events and their echoes. An underlying drive for a long time, this writing has finally emerged as the specific project of recounting her life story and that of her loved ones. 

 

Since, Colette Pourroy has been relentlessly exploring her family, their avowed and disavowed stories, each family member’s place, pain and nostalgia. Her family saga has henceforth become a trilogy on her father, her sister, and now finally her mother. Chapter after chapter, through both visions and reminiscence, the photographer recounts this family story. Here the figure of the mother dominates. Under the influence of her magnetic writing, we follow her through a labyrinth of clues, allusions and illusions. Without the narrative thread, only our imagination can help us find our way as we interpret the scattered signs she leaves for us amid these pages. The shadow of the absent father that traverses the first series, and the uneasiness, the fear and phantoms that surface from the series on her sister all give way here to an omnipresent yet evanescent sense of mystery and fascination for the female body that seems to eclipse what has come before. The unique poetry of Colette Pourroy’s visual universe feeds on very personal emotions. The portrait of a young woman and the staged appearances of her counterpart reinforce the sensuality, the force and the femininity of the protagonist of this new tale, of this mother who so loved the color red. Her daughter has chosen to translate this into black and white.