Veronique Boyens

VERSION FRANÇAISE

“At A Distance” is the visual story of me as a European who traveled to the USA on a photographic mission to capture Americana in self-portraits over several months. This project was interrupted by the pandemic, and I found myself at a distance from both this country and my original plan as the country steadily shut down.  

Originally, I was planning on touring the country in my Kia minivan as a solo female for 5 months, capturing self-portraits on location as I usually do. But I had to reverse course and hunker down after only two weeks on the road due to the invasion of the coronavirus.

In that short period of time, I was still able to observe America during this strange time. I was clearly looking at a country thrown off balance, put on pause, frozen, switching off. The few people I encountered were static, in the close proximity of their homes, and would stare at me being the only thing moving around in their neighborhood. I had that feeling of being out of place, unwelcome, not serene. I longed for a place to be.

Once in shelter and with the landscapes I had made on my trip while location scouting, I decided to use them as backdrops for scenes of what should be or could have been that I would imagine. I then shot myself, my minivan and a friend of mine in the same conditions of light and perspective as those backdrops to composit them into tableaus. Unconsciously, I was narrating my wandering in retrospect in a figurative way.

So, in opposition to my main body of work, this series embraces different levels of production. Also, inviting another character in my self-portraits is something new to me. This character plays a key role, serving the narrative and creating tension, to find the drama of the scene, on top of the light and the colors.

Usually, I aim to turn the ordinary state of things into something extraordinary, the small, nondescript thing that usually go unnoticed, into moments and atmospheres of intensity and drama, but here, during a time of unusual emptiness and isolation, every small thing became extraordinary on its own.

While I normally try in my work to relieve the scene of any specific time or place, being anywhere and nowhere simultaneously, time and place in suspension, here, the time reference was unavoidable and the accessory of a face mask and a map locked the scenes in THIS particular time and place.

In this series entitled “16:9 (Sixteen-by-Nine)” in reference to the classic cinematographic projection format, my photographs are intended to be film stills of fictional cinema movies, like copies without originals. I play various stereotypical female roles inspired by the American road movie genre of the 80s and the 90s. These roles, in my opinion, represent clichés deeply rooted in the cultural imagination, like America and its endless roads, its peeled deserts, its dark boulevards and its neon-lit motels.

One film in particular, "Thelma & Louise" by Ridley Scott, fascinated me as a teenager, influencing some of my life choices and driving me into exile in the United States for a few years. What sets “Thelma & Louise” apart from the great central tradition of the road picture -- a tradition roomy enough to accommodate “Easy Rider,” “Bonnie and Clyde,” “Badlands,” “Midnight Run” and “Rain Man” -- is that, this time, the heroes are women, both working-class, both ready to describe themselves as utterly ordinary, yet both containing unexpected resources.

It is in this same spirit of scenario that I wanted to evolve my characters, through more frontal and falsely instantaneous images. Unlike “A Silent Theater”, my heroines here have a more assertive personality, have control of their lives and are more active. I wanted them to occupy space, the foreground, and their faces to be expressive, detailed and unvarnished.

Welcome to “A Silent Theater”, the theater of a world in suspension, where the players here, unlike those of Shakespeare, probably remain forever behind the curtain.

The theme of my images refers to the fictional world of Bovary’s women; socially neglected, abandoned, rooted in a subordinate position to the world around them. The motivation behind my photographic approach is truly to excite in the viewers the need to extend the narrative, to expand the universe of the scene into the universe of their experience.

My role as a photographer ends the moment the shutter closes on my completely manufactured scene. It is then that I withdraw from the story and let the viewer take ownership in the viewer’s own way. No caption beneath the image, just the anecdotal signature of a self-portrait that is secondary to the scene.

Made in undefined areas and rendered anonymous for the most part, I want my photographs to capture the stillness and the underlying characteristics of the place, of the time and of the situation. In that framework, the characters are always at the margin, off center, beyond the edge of the world. I want their faces to be reduced to masks without nuance, almost expressionless, revealing the hidden mystery of human nature.

The female figures are in waiting, in reflection and in retrospection, or when acting, in the service of others. They quietly suffer their condition and seek to connect to an elsewhere, to a world without connections and distracted in various ways (in reading, in contemplation, lost in reverie,…). It’s like only their dreams can escape the frame. Unless the viewer’s imagination allows them, they may never move beyond the dream but will remain behind the curtain of their lives.

I try to remove all superfluous elements in my compositions so that a silence settles in. Replaced by the universal, I want my pictures to reflect the widest possible social panorama. The few details I concede are intended to implement the dreamlike tale of the picture or to subtly suggest meaning – which is not deliberate. So the stories behind the photographs prohibit any hasty conclusions but come back endlessly upon themselves like a residual dream.

My goal is to make them simple yet mysterious, banal yet poetic, familiar and unfathomable.

A young woman.
An existence full of habits.
A face-to-face with everyday life, from the bathroom to the office, including shopping.
To search for images through the objects and mythologies of all days: make masks and adornments, funny, old-fashioned and disturbing.
To play hide-and-seek with them: hidden side, visible side…
To take them in the face, but always keep your face, do not let yourself be disfigured : tame the little beasts of everyday life and let the facetious imagination arise.
To live with the routine since it sticks to your skin.
Or rather to make it more livable.
To divert it to make its presence an opportunity for creation.

Traduction à venir. Merci pour votre patience.