Oliver Aoun

Ephemeral characters, double exposures, blurred effects, dematerialized beings and the soft clothes that caress them. In On Ghosts and Angels, the photographer meets the challenge of his title.

Mixing pastel colours and grey-dominated black and white, he asserts his visions, the lightness of floating worlds, which appear to be neither fashion photography nor narrative. Nevertheless, Oliver Aoun says he wants to take a literary approach, a poetic process that builds up the mystery. It is what the photographer – who splits his time between his native Lebanon and Paris – calls a “poetics of loss” and which is a constant in all his work. For him, the city is a backdrop that can appear magical or disturbing, filled with characters unable to limit themselves to a single identity or appearance – even when he does not direct them, as he did for his exploration of La Samaritaine. He made the building his own, which became his set for the duration of the shoot.

“Taken between draughts, murmuring voices that slip out. Feminine whispering, exhaled by old stones, a building that resembles a city; drab, immense, empty. The woman sleeps profoundly; she is struck dumb. In the corridors a couple play hide and seek. They whisper, they laugh… they leave. What are left behind are the images – and a building. Drab, immense, empty.” A sort of enigmatic fairy tale also subsists, that tells of how this space was waiting for we-don’t-know-what.