Dear Sabine,
You were a student of mine and I had the privelege to curate your first exhibition.
I have followed your artistic career since its beginning, and now here I am writing to you, in person, about your work.
As you know, I have been curating various photographic events for years and every day I am in contact with renowned photographers for the editorial business, books and exhibitions in galleries and museums. Put it this way, I live photography full-time!
Nevertheless, for some time now, I've been strongly attracted to a different, or rather more private, kind of photography, which while less narrative from a journalistic point of view, is more intense if interpreted as sentiment, as a means for self awareness.
Finding you again has something to do with coincidence, that same coincidence you exert and seek enduringly.
These photos of yours have the feel of "objets trouvés": images that register the past of a single face, but reach us like a family album, whose story is told through resemblance and kindred expressions.
In your images I perceive a desperate need for a sense of belonging that you have always sought after. Your artistic act reconstructs the story of life and arranges the images in chronological order, as the only evidence of your origins.
You use these photographs as a base for self reflection, that starts with your quest for a body double - a superficial resemblance and a some sort of beyond physical connection - to attain recognition of yourself, with men and women you've never seen before. Unknown people that wear t-shirts bearing the name Sabine Delafon are associated to you for some unknown reason, and from that moment on they become part of your ideal family.
The act of photography represents for you the fundamental element of relation and testimony of an imagined reality, asserted in the depersonalizing age of iconism.
The inner dispute, the the loss of a solid identity belongs to the past
What remains is the angst of a complex and enchanting personality, that takes shape through the act of photography. The relentless search for yourself is articulated in the interminable series of portrait passport photos taken in photo booths, where your face appears in 500 photos taken from 1987 to date: since then your identity has left fleeting traces on instant images, the rest is lost in the incessant turmoil of reality.
Dear Sabine,
like you I rediscover the beauty of private photography,
with you I share the passion for the intimacy of past images.
Denis Curti, Milan, November 2009
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