About her Blood Line project Anne-Laure says:
Once your parents pass away, you realise you’re next in line. My father was diagnosed with terminal cancer at the tender age of 64. Blood Line investigates how his inescapable disease and death also affected my own life. I saw my father’s pain and felt my own. My subjects are my daughters, my flesh and blood, his descendants. He experienced, I processed, they embody.
With this work I address how terminal illness turns our lives upside down and affects communication and identity. When I was with my dad, he and I knew his days were numbered. I was able to say things I might not have shared before, but I also found myself withholding private thoughts. My version of reality and truth shifted. Blood Line illustrates the ensuing coding of language and our morphing sense of Self.
Life as I knew it was radically redefined and my personal definition of a photograph evolved. In much of the work, I altered the surface of my pigment ink prints with the medical supplies that overtook our lives, such as gauze, suture thread, eosin…, even my own blood that I drew from my fingers. I cut the prints with scalpels and tore them by hand. By lineage, I am the literal link between my father and my daughters. Now I am also that link through the work of my hands.
A year later he is gone, and when I am too, the photographs will still be there to connect us all.
Anne-Laure Autin is an emerging fine-art photographer whose empathetic imagery goes to the core of human connection. Her work, exhibited internationally, is emotive and honest yet hopeful. She draws inspiration from her daily personal interactions, enraptured by the myriad of contrasting juxtapositions life offers us. She is particularly moved by womanhood with its rich intricacies and seemingly contradicting themes such as Strength and Vulnerability. Her search for beauty in authenticity makes her award-winning work both soulful and highly intimate.
Preoccupied with the philosophical concept of Universal Truth as a teenager, she also found an undeniable aesthetic in the purest of sciences; she therefore studied Theoretical Mathematics and holds an MSc from the University of Leiden (NL). She embraces the duality of her fascination for Truth and her love of Human Nature – where no logic seems to prevail – by always seeking the deepest most candid and raw emotions in her subjects. Anne-Laure was born and raised in France and moved to the Netherlands when she was 13. She recently returned from a six years relocation in Western Canada with her British family and is based in the Netherlands again.
Website: annelaureautin.com
