Adrien Blondel

Adrien Blondel was born and raised in Normandy, France. He moved to Paris to study history of cinema at La Sorbonne Paris 3 and then attended the international institute of image and sound where he graduated with a cinematographer degree.
Adrien works in the film industry as a grip, director of photography and cameraman. After shooting his feature documentary on the freedom riders in the US he decided to move to California, where he is pursuing his career in the film industry.
In the meantime he developed his photography practice, through a few commission jobs, but mostly through personal practice. His photography focuses on architecture and landscape and explores the relations between people and their environment, the idea of the functionality of our surroundings, and a sense of secret and mystery. Moving to a foreign country resulted in an increased interest for the notions of language, relationships to others and the idea of home in his photography.

Domestic anamnesis

It is a common thing to think about the bedroom in which one grew up, scattered memories of a time cherished or loathed, but essential, the private space of self development.
Most people move out and away from their childhood room, and seldom keep a link to this space, other than in their memory or photographs, where the space itself is often just the background.
For some, the room has barely changed since they lived in it, and it is as if the memories settled, like dust, the room remains suspended in time, a personal museum . For others, the room has been entirely remodeled, keeping almost no traces of the memories evoked.

This series is a playful attempt at reversing the concept of photography as the representation of something that is no longer, by presenting people’s memory of their childhood bedroom, collected as an interview, with a photograph of what the room is now, creating an image that contradicts the memories evoked, and the visualization that comes from hearing them. The photographs were taken after the interview, in the hope that, consciously or not, the image will reflect on the memories that were evoked, and point at how a human presence in a place possibly leaves it changed. This process tries to acknowledge the layers present in a room, the never ending creation of memories linked to a given space and the multitudes that pass through it, and maybe the sum of all of those memories tells us about the essence of a space.

This project was intended as a multimedia piece. Some of the images submitted should be accompanied by an interview, please have a look at https://www.adrienblondelphotography.com/domesticanamnesis to get a better idea of what the series looks like.

Thanks!

To view more of Adrien’s work please visit his website.