Eloïse Labarbe-Lafon, (or Bambi to her friends) has eyes with the magnetic pull of a true muse and the projections of a true artist. As a teenager, she studied analogue photography in her hometown before attending the esteemed Sorbonne Université and launching her art career. Her method feels like a rebellion against instantaneity, where she shoots black and white analogue photos, processes them, makes prints adding effects in the dark room, paints them for hours, scans them, and then removes every speck of dust that gets trapped in the paint. Subsequently, the many hours that go into a moment change the meaning for the artist and audience. Not just her ow r the burger’s demise. When speaking of her early learning, she tells me, “My mind exploded when I realised what I was actually learning to do. I remember my teenage photographs appearing in the chemicals, moving underwater in the reflections of the red light. I felt like I had some kind of power that was giving me the possibility to materialise things from my mind in some magical way.”

Like most teenagers, Labarbe-Lafon had a love of cinema, the first that struck her aesthetically being Elephant by Gus Van Sant. “I remember twisting a fork I stole at the school canteen to make a bracelet out of it, like the boy in the movie, which I kept on my wrist for months. I don’t know if the aesthetic of this movie had an impact on my photography, but I know that it had an impact on my perception of life, that I wanted it to be cinematic; soft aesthetics and colours I saved in my mind. When I was 15, I wanted my life to be visually more beautiful than reality, and I think that this is still relevant today in my work.”

When you look at Labarbe-Lafon’s work, there is a playfulness and naivety that is implied through the soft pastels, the capturing and immortalising of soft toys as subjects, and perhaps an expression on the model's face. When I posit this to Labarbe-Lafon, she tells me that the playfulness comes from the artistic process, more so than the colours. As a child she was obsessed with 70s French film Donkey Skin by Jacques Demy, as well as Wednesday from The Addams Family and Xena: Warrior Princess, which seems to explain the almost Shermanesque dressing up and characters that appear in some of her self-portraits. “My mother made me the Donkey Skin ‘sun dress’ when I was four by cutting a gold dress of hers, and the ’moon dress’ when I was 17. Dressing up is something I still love and use in my photography, especially when I shoot self-portraits. In a photo you can be whoever you want to be, you can use things you would maybe not wear in real life; you can play, act, be different or be a kid again – the kid you still are.”

However, Labarbe-Lafon takes as much influence from her art history degree, where she discovered the Symbolists and Pre-Raphaelite painters that she deeply loved before moving into the film heritage world, where she worked as a film restorer and then colourising war documentaries. I can imagine this would be an emotionally intense job and not one for the faint of heart. She explains, “even when there was nothing too violent on the screen, the violence was omnipresent. I remember feeling sick after putting some colours on Hitler and giving him pink outfits just for a few minutes to make me feel better. But I found some beauty in all that too, and in the duty of preserving history and memory.”

“I also remember colourising an American soldier struggling to get out of the sea, with blood on his clothes, gazing intensely at the camera while moving towards it, filmed in a cinematic zoom. I spent hours working on this scene, and I ended up having butterflies in my stomach and having feelings for this completely anonymous and dead man, after hours of staring into each other’s eyes and making him alive again by giving him back his colours, little by little. I found this experience so beautiful, and felt like there was some kind of balance – that beauty could be found everywhere.”

Naturally, although imperceptible at the time, these archives she colourised influenced Labarbe-Lafon along with the films of Andrei Tarkovsky, Louis Malle, and Béla Tarr. She feels the actions of the characters in Nouvelle Vague cinema compelling, the ethos close to her own perception of life and human interactions, asking me sweetly, “Is that normal?” I am the worst person to provide her with a suitable answer…

To view her life through her art, Labarbe-Lafon’s world is one of deep beauty, romance and intimacy, often using her partner, French cowboy musician, Ryder, as her subject. In an age where we are encouraged to put our lives on display with immediacy, I’m curious to hear her thoughts on intimacy and staging. Labarbe-Lafon explains, “I love to mix intimacy and staging, always in this need of living in a painting or a movie. The act of taking the photo itself is never planned in advance, it all happens following my instinct, but sometimes I feel like a place is so beautiful that I need to stage something in it, and I set up my characters like little lead soldiers on a field, preparing the protagonists of a new tale.”

Working with your lover can be exhilarating or dangerous – usually both – but there is something unique about the way Labarbe-Lafon documents her travels and relationship. There is the moment of the photograph's creation, then the reflection through the meditative painting. Touring with her partner has allowed for Ryder to make his way into her art whilst he simultaneously supports and inspires Labarbe-Lafon. When speaking of him, she rhapsodises, “he has the most beautiful mind and deepest sensitivity and the fact that he always understands what I want to do makes him the best model and partner in crime. Who wouldn’t want a sad French cowboy as their main model? The photos I have taken of him are among my favourites, and even though they can be staged, they are also the testimony of genuine and pure moments of life in many different parts of the world that I then like to turn into surreal scenes while applying the paint.”

“When I shoot self-portraits, I feel like a little boy, like a princess, like a nice ghost, like a sad cat or a broken stuffed animal in a really silent world.” 

“I also adore shooting artworks and videos for his music project, and to materialise his vision. I found it very touching. I cherish the idea that still images can have a soundtrack, and that’s something possible with him. To me, capturing love and romance is a simple and organic thing to do without overthinking it. It feels right to let love (and pain) highlight my work, to document life and preserve memories, while staying true to my style and vision. The moment with him I wanted to encapsulate forever, and that I care very much for, is my latest book project, Motel 42, which I could never have made without him.”

Motel 42 is Labarbe-Lafon’s second photo book, and her favourite project to date. It’s a series of 42 self-portraits in 42 different motel rooms on her first trip to the United States. Labarbe-Lafon entered a world she had only seen before in cinema and had the urge to document every room, capturing each’s diversity and simultaneous anonymity.

“A rollercoaster at the window; a light suggesting the imminent end of the world or the arrival of an angel behind the glass; the same dresses every day; flesh, love and loneliness. The idea was to show the intimacy, the inside, the silence, behind this overwhelming trip. No matter how tired I was, waking up after a few hours of sleep, I had the urge to create a pictorial composition with whatever was there in the room, using my body as the common thread of this whole project in the 42 different beds we slept in. With the use of colour, I turned the grey and dirty rooms into some disturbing and cherished worlds of my own. In the book, there is also a diary I wrote each day, with the rooms as the starting point of the reflection. Personal little notes about ghosts, love, mean motel tenants, Ryder, cigarette holes in sheets, sex and pancakes for breakfast.”

I presume that it must take some bravery to reveal one’s self, body and relationships so intimately, even if it is through a considered and time-consuming process. Having modelled for others, I speculate that this may have informed Labarbe-Lafon’s perception of herself, that perhaps there is a conflict between how others see her versus how she sees herself. With honesty she tells me, “I like myself better in my photos than in reality, and at the same time I don’t see myself in my photos anymore. Taking so many self-portraits became such a convenient thing for me, because I’m always available and down to experiment with postures all the time. I don’t have to please a model or to make any artistic concessions. I don’t care if I look ridiculous or funny with my pouty face, Pierrot attitude and red cheeks, I don’t mind if the paint makes me look like I had lipstick all around my mouth. When I shoot self-portraits, I feel like a little boy, like a princess, like a nice ghost, like a sad cat or a broken stuffed animal in a really silent world. In the photos I recognise my features, but they’re just forming a face with paint and fingerprints all over it. I feel close and dissociated from my characters at the same time. More than my own muse, I would call myself my own puppet. My face and body are the vessel of an emotion that I want to share that goes beyond who I am.”

As an incredibly shy child Labarbe-Lafon saw herself as too tall and clumsy, trying to hide her body for fear of looking like “a lost giraffe”. “When I was a teenager, I started posing for friends, and later modelling took a real place in my life. This helped me tremendously to see myself differently, to accept that my face was different from the beauty standards, but that it could become a strength. I’m not modelling anymore, but to have been seen through other photographers’ eyes helped me to know how to move my body, how to play with the light on my face, and how to guide my models and tell them what to do and mimic the postures they could take.”

It would be remiss of me to not ask Labarbe-Lafon about her relationship with the male and female gaze. I’m curious to know, especially when shooting nudes, if this is a preoccupation within her art, can this discussion be avoided? Labarbe-Lafon believes that we are constantly and awkwardly confronted by the male gaze, and this was felt more when she was a model. However, when it comes to her self-portraits, she doesn’t ask herself these questions anymore, “because nobody other than me is involved in the projects, and I never know if I’ll share the photo while I’m taking it. It’s for me in the first place.”

“More than my own muse, I would call myself my own puppet. My face and body are the vessel of an emotion that I want to share that goes beyond who I am.” 

Labarbe-Lafon is very comfortable with nudity, and she feels it would be amazing if we all could live naked. “I feel comfortable being naked in my photos, because I don’t see them as sexy, I just see them as natural. Photographing a body is extremely interesting, and I see mine as a powerful tool; a moving canvas with a lot of space to add paint and texture to. But as you can imagine, on the side of the spectator, I got many unrequested reflections about me being naked! I try to ignore them and just keep doing what I do, because I’m not making photos for the creeps, I’m making them because I feel the urge too. It makes me so mad to live in a society where we’re constantly sexualized and forced to hide our breasts just because of being a woman, when showing our bodies should be so natural, simple and freeing. In my photographs, I find a sane refuge in an insane world.”

However, in spite of the world’s (perhaps ever increasing) insanity, Labarbe-Lafon continues to create fervently. Already working on her third book, she is also exploring artisanal techniques working with stained glass, which she has made into frames for her photographs. She has an intense wanderlust and desire to keep working with musicians and other artists as she travels. Although her life is full of romance and joy, there is a melancholy that she wishes to capture too, as she seeks to encompass life in its broad entirety in her work.

“Through my work, I try to make the world a beautiful space where I could live forever. The colours are like what you could imagine reading a tale, the characters look like dolls frozen in a universe that is hard to place, chronologically. And these coloured worlds of my own also help me a lot, dealing with my constant melancholy. I find my work playful, soft and intimate, but also combined with a dominant sadness and a river of tears that I need to express.” If only all tears contained such thoughtful beauty.

To experience the Models Inc issue in its entirety, the September edition of RUSSH is available on newsstands from 2 September and through our shop online. Read more about the inspiration behind the issue in Jess Blanch's editor's letter. Wanting to purchase the Ideas issue in person? Find a stockist near you.