Sophie le Roux / Photography + Film

Sophie le Roux's photography is almost entirely preoccupied by texture, colour, and chance. She frequently uses expired film to produce unpredictable, aleatory pictures, and is fascinated by the accidents that occur at the beginning and end of the roll: a counterintuitive blaze of colour, an elegant chaos of shapes. The camera is encouraged to create something new out of what she’s pointed it at, so that the final result seems to merge the external world with an interior imagination: a photograph captured in the act of capturing itself. The unusual is discovered inside the usual.

In her street series, le Roux travels across Europe to find neglected corners of cities and landscapes, and uplift the accidental art of decay and graffiti. In a painterly style, she re-appropriates detritus and anonymous passers-by alike into highly composed and colour-saturated still-lives. Significance, beauty, individuality is found where it is least supposed to be – in the margins of the endless urban narrative. These ‘found’ moments are typically off-beat, unexceptional, but imbued by her gaze with a new, richer emotion, that’s somehow both intimately melancholic and at a remove. 

More recently, she has been exploring a greater degree of abstraction, in series such as ‘Tintz’ and ‘Spectrum’, in which the interplay of texture, colour, and chance are elevated to the status of subject. The vivid monochromatic blocks recall Rothko, but made unique in the contrast with images of the osmotic interplay of chemical light. Le Roux’s technique in these series is as much curatorial as photographic: she selects very particular ‘accidents’ from rolls of many, and generates a new collective meaning, a deeper sense of feeling, by placing them in sequence. 

Throughout her work, there is a consistency of approach that is not content simply to reveal secret realities, but to enhance them. She wants more from the world, and so lets you see it twice: in what unexpected moment has been captured, and again, in how the moment has been captured by the fickle medium of denatured film.

Text by Jonathan Lyon

Portrait by Maïté Moloney