24H Man's Light

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Workshop note:

Synopsis

During those crazy 24 hours, everything happened.
But what exactly happened?
The memory is already fading. The noise is receding. The lights have been turned off.
The image, however, will remain.
Laurente Delamarre's photographic work was already shaping up to be a battle.
A fight to the death against oblivion against Goliath. And we didn't know who would win.
The Good News had been announced. After years of racing, the three drivers reverently placed their helmets on the tarmac. A cross was drawn on the ground. The sun was setting in the West. The benevolent eye of the public welcomed them. And like a mise en abîme, Laurente's lens looked at those who see.
For 24 hours, a world was about to go wild. Against a red background, a single word would trigger the hostilities.
Like the valiant mountaineer in his time, Laurente would face his brand new north face. The slope of the race would allow itself to be seduced by the only one who dared to approach it with the purest finesse and the greatest tenderness, and tireless determination.
Here, things would be reversed: it was the virile battle that would validate the delicacy of a pictorial approach. Like a painter-photographer seducing it with his sincerity, Laurente would demonstrate his stubborn passion to the mechanical monster and bring it the long-awaited message.
That of the Marian synergy between insistent finesse and brute force.
Amidst the incessant noise, Laurente Time is definitely on his side, as he knows how much inhabiting a place encourages the elements to dance around his wide-angle Rollei-flex with vertical viewfinder.
This circuit is a woman. She allows herself to be explored, and even molested. With patience, gentleness, abandonment, and hope. Laurente, without a word, bears witness to the piercing screams she produces when the rubber heats up the narrow curves of her anatomy. He also shows what she has
allowed her children to do, letting them trample her, inhabit her, squabble on her, fix their territorial huts on her. In the form of asphalt, her fleshly envelope is the basis of everything. She is everywhere.
No one will ever tell her. But everyone knows their debt to her.
The racing cars are men, fighting each other like demigods with powerful, barely concealed designs.
Laurente Delamarre's pictorial approach asks:
Why impose such an ordeal on oneself?
Why brave death for 24 long hours?
Why fight to eliminate one's neighbour?
What justifies all these sacrifices?
And Laurente answers: the justification for everything is her. Through her. with her. And in her. For all her honours and glory.

Only one will win her allegiance. In complete silence, the lady will have made her choice, opening her crowned door and welcoming the chosen one, roaring and exhausted. And the painter-photographer will then reveal how much the space has expanded: all around the victor and his destiny, the world has reverently withdrawn.
What singular energy, cognitive tools and spirit of synthesis it must have taken to depict this cycle of unity. With iron patience, Laurente will have taken that side step that we would have been terrified to take in such an environment. In the subtle balance, he will have taken the risk of missing the moment. He introduced his own symbolism of signs. And all this was presided over by his counterpoint approach.
He too braved an absolute: the fear of disappointing. Of sinking into anachronism. It must be said that the margin was narrow. Like on those mountain ridges where the risk of falling was constant.
Ultimately, he spoke to us only of himself, to the almost neurotic point where revolution occurs: he speaks to us only of what the mission of Man is. Of what lies dormant, lurking deep within us. Ready to burst forth. Of what we will one day embody. Our conquest will come at the price of having seen what the demigods have accomplished. And Laurente Delamarre, in all his singularity, will have shown us the paths and the reconciled paradoxes.


Andréa Valienne