Danse Macabre, 2023

Hélène Hubert  

The common – or better said, golden - thread of Hélène Hubert’s photographic work is the energy that animates still lives. She captures singular light impressions which disclose this blurred zone between the object, its reflection and what it represents. The artist searches all the spaces in which the objective reality reveals a secret which might not appear at first sight. Above all, it is the vibration fields of an object and / or a situation that invites the photographer to trigger her artistic sense through a lightning flash, an impulse or an emotion.

Tuned up to this frequency in her now virtual darkroom, Hélène Hubert dusts her photographic file with the tip of her stylus bringing out the infinitely small, the infinitely visible, “the one visible “- literally - « l’un visible » as defined by the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan on the existence of three levels, the Real, the Symbolic and the Imaginary.

Her images, reveal the evanescent manifestations of the internal reality of her subjects, focusing to render this perceptive intensity, all connected within the same material: life.

Freelance photographer and author, Hélène Hubert studied Fine Art photography in Maine, USA in the early 1980s at the Art Institute of Boston. This is how the artist discovered Ansel Adams Zone-System and implemented it to her photographic practice and work philosophy. As early as 1998, the photographer fitted her view-camera with digital backs replacing the 4”x5” analogic film holder. Hélène Hubert has been using digital cameras ever since, positioning digital photography as a mirror of all the energies that circulate beyond human vision.

Her skill for highlighting everyday objects has asserted itself over the years: silhouettes, shadows and allusions of presence suggest the existence of parallel worlds where distortion, dreamlike and dual meaning prevail. At the heart of Hélène Hubert's work, the object becomes a subject gifted with a life of its own, permeable to sight. Freed from the constraints of documenting reality, the photographer is caught by the need to freeze impermanence, in all passageways or moments of transition, to experiment and give us the opportunity to see the multiple parallel worlds that we cross.

Her works are already part of art collections in Europe and the United States.