There are times when you walk into a gallery and look at the work on the wall and somehow every seems right and in place. It isn’t necessarily great work, but something that hangs together, that has a consistency of feeling and a strong sense of having been created by a thinking and feeling person able to express themselves clearly.
I felt that strongly when I walked into Galerie Claire Corcia on the rue Saint-Martin and began to look at the black and white images of Louise Narbo. Born in Algeria, she came to Paris where she still lives in the 1960s to continue her studies, training to become a pyschoanalyst. It didn’t surprise me to learn this after seeing her work which had already impressed me as being very much concerned with states of mind.
The work on show covered a wider range than on the gallery site, and you can see more on Narbo’s own site. There are several series of pictures, along with some short texts about the projects and about her and her photographic interests. Many of the pictures I saw at the gallery are on that site, although I think some I particularly liked made recently in her Vincennes flat are not.
Narbo has been taking photographs for over 30 years, and had her first personal show in 1982. One of the series I liked most on her site, “Ce qui ne s’ecrit pas” was shown in 1989. Although all the series had images that I liked, this seemed to work better as a series.
She currently has another show, Hiver Fertile, pictures from the Bois de Vincennes at the eastern edge of Paris, close to where she lives, on show in Vincennes until Dec 20, 2008. You can see some other work from the Bois de Vincennes on her site.
