The French movie The Dreamlife of Angels (La vie rêvée des anges, 1998), directed by Erick Zonca, is a narrative of two younger girls stumbling via precarious lives, circling each other in a rhythm of intimacy and survival. That sense of treading the cusp of transformation sits on the coronary heart of photographer Elise Toïdé’s newest challenge, a zine titled The Dream Life of Angels.
The connection to Zonca’s movie was not deliberate. The title got here from the challenge’s artwork director, Wataru Komachi, who prompt it throughout the challenge’s early levels. Only later did Toïdé reveal that she had been deeply moved by the movie years earlier than. “When I found out, I felt an intense emotion: it was like silent recognition, this unexpected connection between his vision and mine moved me deeply.”
The zine gathers portraits of 4 younger girls – Gabrielle, Dana, Ari and Cat – photographed in Paris and its outskirts. The settings are strange: childhood bedrooms, grassy parks, the neglected margins of town. Toïdé’s Paris is one thing exterior of the standard postcard romanticism, as an alternative utilizing the banal backdrops to attract the main focus to the sense of transition unfolding in every body. “These ordinary places become the setting for metamorphoses. Their banality serves as a backdrop for an almost cinematic atmosphere, where intimacy and dreams intertwine,” she explains.
It’s this similar mundanity that follows the themes. There’s no overriding plot or story that’s simple to observe, however as an alternative a common temper that swells within the pictures as the themes sit idle of their bedrooms, kick round in soccer cleats and roll within the grass with their faces naked and hair falling misplaced. It’s an idleness that solely an adolescent can know. “Adolescence is a time of metamorphosis, when everything is still possible,” Toïdé says. “It’s also a moment that speaks to memory and to the passage of time, a fragile threshold that never fully leaves us. In those gestures, in that oscillation between shadow and light, I find the same tension that runs through much of my work.”
One medium through which Toïdé communicates that metamorphosis is thru the usage of nature throughout the pictures. Within the frames are flowering bulbs, butterflies, and rolling hills of grass. “Nature is like a mirror of emotions,” Toïdé explains. “Flowers, grasses, and light become echoes of faces. I love this correspondence between the inner world of teenage girls and fragile, ephemeral landscapes.” A standout shot of the sequence is one among long-time collaborator Gabrielle, the place she stands on the point of a lake, melancholic in expression. “She looks straight into the lens, with a gentle yet almost wild intensity. It is as if the entire project is concentrated in this suspended moment,” Toïdé explains.
Though it is perhaps tempting to learn the work as a private documentation of French girlhood in an idle city, The Dream Life of Angels speaks to a wider illustration of girlhood. Toïdé brazenly cites cinema as her strongest affect, naming filmmakers Guy Gilles, Mikhael Hers and Mia Hansen-Løve. “What inspires me is their way of working with atmosphere and rhythm, how they capture everyday life with sensitivity, leaving room for silence, time and light,” Toïdé says. She additionally credit fairytales, evocative interiors, and themes of time, reminiscence and goals as touchstones of her course.
When requested concerning the emotion coursing via the challenge, Toïdé lands on vertigo, a disorienting, dizzying sensation of standing at a threshold. “The vertigo of growing up, of searching for oneself, of being on the edge of something” are the primary themes that the sequence centres round. This suspension is one she hopes lingers for viewers: “I would like them to feel a sense of floating, like a reminiscence of their own adolescence, with its mixture of hope, loneliness and fragile beauty.”
The Dream Life of Angels is offered here