Night after night, I take my compact camera, I hold it at arm’s length and I sink in the dark bars, in the infamous perfumes of the street, I seek the fragments of the bodies, the frailties, the hopes, the sounds of the glasses that we drink.
It is an imperious and wild desire. I approach as much as possible with this dream impossible to abolish any distance, to reinvent the real.
“May you stay Forever Y/oung” is born when life and its confirmation by photography became inseparable. It’s not just a diary of my nocturnal wanderings. I found in the night a moment of communion, a place where alcohol and excess made it possible to free oneself from the tragic feeling of loneliness. I met characters of light in the dark and we were at this moment, when the flash illuminated what we were living, happy to enjoy in the agony of a promise of renewal. In all these nights that I spend triggering and triggering again, there is vertigo and disarray. It is this vertigo and disarray that I seek. And the next day, the images are there to testify that all this has indeed taken place.
I consider uncertain these fragments torn from life. I only care about their elaboration, this moment of the shooting where excess, vertigo and wandering are culminating. There is in the photographic gesture something unfinished, insufficient and incomplete which opposes the discursive logic and artifices with which the world become acceptable. To photograph is to deny and foil all morals, all beliefs, all justifications that would want to contain the vital impetus, the organic thrill brought to its most cruel expression. I make images but I only consider them as a pretext for this possibility of existence.
About Elie Monferier
Elie Monferier is a French photographer born in 1988. After earning a master’s degree in Modern Literature from Bordeaux-Montaigne University, he discovered in photography a way to experience the world and exceed the language, express the uncertainty, the desire and the violence on which all human relationships are based. [Official Website]
