Kim Bledsoe Lloyd

Des Reflets sur une Rue de Paris, le printemps 2022 (Reflections on a Street in Paris, Spring 2022)

Reflections, like the one in a mirror, on a glass table top or the plexiglass of a Louis Vuitton advert as we wait for a bus to arrive, can startle us. Oh, my hair is out of place. I have food on my shirt. Yet multi-layered, inanimate reflections often give us the chance to view something as an impermanence, an abstraction. These abstractions sometimes ask us to tangle with what we don’t understand.

Reflections can also have another meaning, what we make of things, how we perceive them. Like dreams, someone else’s perception can add a dimension to reality creating a different way of looking at or understanding the world and its complications. Do we do this enough, consider someone else’s perception? Though there are few physical reflections in the photographs below, most are asking these questions - how do you feel when you look at these, what do you assume. Can you risk seeing another way, both what you believe the subjects are experiencing and maybe something else, something you wouldn’t ordinarily consider?

I chose Paris as the backdrop for this work because as a creative metropolis, it is often a first choice for a gaze into what draws and keeps us in a place, marking time. These are times, such as they are, that we live together, vestiges of the same air, light and earth slowly returning somewhere. These moments — upwards of 72 GBs of faces and places — were captured using a high shutter speed and aperture to convey a single frame of motion in time and space.

The moments are of elders, youth, the eccentric, the tired, beauties of symmetry and non-symmetry, shoppers, workers and tourists taken while seated at a busy street-corner cafe in Paris.

With each frame, where does your gaze land, where the photographer intended or somewhere else? Is there a hand gesture, a caress, a look of longing, of joy, of despair? Where are they going? Who is experiencing freedom? Anyone?

(For better viewing, click the photo to enlarge.)

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