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Lockdown Diary and Adriane's Thread by Sandra Beauchard
Sandra Beauchard was born and lives in France. With a degree in Art History and Art Market, images - painting and photography in particular - have always been her vehicles for getting through her personal and professional life.
As a child, seeing her father's eye hidden behind his Kodak Retina, she understood that the viewfinder was more than a frame: it was the gateway to the world’s vastness. As a teenager, she used her own camera as a diary to be closed as soon as the confidences are made.
Hiroshima Habibti, Transfulgurances Series (or ‘Dazzling Journey’), 2020
Autoportrait, 2022
In 2018, deciding to focus more openly on photography and writing, she left Paris for the beautiful light of the Loire region. This was the start of getting out boxes, a multitude of forgotten negatives and slides. She bought a scanner and began to organise her photographic work. It has been a long road: almost forty years to look at her own work with equanimity and confidence.
In 2012, Sandra Beauchard became the director of the Estée Lauder Pink Ribbon Photo Award - the first photographic competition dedicated to breast cancer.
There is nothing I love so intensely as the elsewhere, the foreign and the others.
End of February 2020: everything sounded good. For a few weeks, the joyful perspective of moving from one continent to another had me jumping out of bed every morning as excited as a child. First, New York where I was invited for the 1st edition of "Paris Photo New York" (which has still not taken place), then, towards the Gulf, for Art Dubai and to continue to photograph the region which inspires me strongly for more than twelve years.
“French citizens, my fellow countrymen. Thursday evening, I addressed you to evoke a public health crisis across the country .Until present, the COVID-19 epidemic was, perhaps, for certain among you, a faraway idea. It has become an immediate and pressing reality… ” — Emmanuel Macron’ speech to the French Republic, March 16, 2020.
The 17th of March 2020 was to become the first of 54 days of strict, severe, unprecedented lockdown, to prevent an enemy with no army and o fwhich we knew so little. The planes would remain on the ground. We would have to produce a signed and written document to buy our daily baguette. Our plans came to a halt. The certainties of the weeks and months wavered. I was starting to feel a bit feverish myself and my internet connection collapsed at the same time, depriving me of any possibility of boring myself with TV series and films. The radio programs were too anxiety-provoking. I was left with my precious books ,my records, my cameras, my phone, an unconnected computer and words in my head, dazed, spinningendlesslylikeshadowsinaprisonor hospital yard. The loneliness does not weigh on me. Far from it. But immobility and confinement are unbearable for me.
Lockdown Diary, Bailey in the Air, Day 25 - April, 10, 2020
Lockdown Diary Day 5 – 03/21/2020 - LIFE IN SLICES
A strange play that's being performed here. Unconscious authors and forced actors that we are. Breaking the rules: under the unity of place, breaking the ones of time and action. Slice cabbage and make small portions to freeze for the days to come. Watch the light come in the house without knocking. Go up the stairs and down the stairs. With no purpose other than to feel the blood warming in the veins. Cut off the hotspot to save the data since the fiber has fell to pieces too. Two hours for working and three for jumping from pillar to post. Cut the time to find one's breath. Let's deconstruct the drama and invent a new theatre. After all this, let's meet to dance on a new stage that we will take great care of.
To get out of there, to escape, both literally and figuratively, I immediately decided to keep a diary in photos and words on my Instagram account (in French and in English). Not very original in itself, but it was the only way I could find to not sink; to keep the rhythm of the days, to believe that there would be new dawns. It was probably also a way of internalising a global "universal" - event that was completely out of my hands.
This lockdown diary does not really tell the story of my daily life, except on rare occasions linked to current news; I share more than my own intimate thoughts and the intimacy of my home, even if most of the photos shared have had this sole setting. Often I woke up with an image in my head that helped me - as the hours went by - to put down my ideas and feelings of the day. Sometimes it was the other way around: I knew what I wanted to share and the image came next. I didn't know if there was any point to it, except for myself, but I was soon surprised to receive messages from people - not close - who said that every morning they checked Instagram to see if my day's post was there. This encouraged me to share photos andtexts for 50 days (I kept the last four days to myself).
The lockdown’s restrictions probably also helped me to concentrate more on the objects in my immediate environment: I set up a small "home studio" which allowed me to photograph and make “sacred” vegetables and fruits (we know how important everything related to food was then!).
This diary - and the confinement in itself - actually gave me a clearer idea o fmy photographic practice. Apart from two or three older photos that seemed to fit my mood of the day, I had to produce a photograph immediately. By this I mean to shoot and look at the result immediately.
Lockdown Diary, 'Through the Looking-Glass', Day 22 - April 7, 2020
Lockdown Diary Day 50 - 05/05/2020 - 50 DAYS & 341.45 km
Fifth day of the fifth month. Fiftieth day of lockdown. This will be my last post in this context.
Apart from being thankful to come out of all this in relative good physical and moral health, and expressing my gratitude to those who have sent me kind words of encouragement, to my family, my friends who are here in spite of everything... I don't really have an assessment to draw from these fifty days. And I don't specifically want to do it. It would be hollow in the face of all my impossibilities and my helplessness. Maybe I should make an imprint of this, so that the light could draw the relief of a new road to take.
512,146 is the number of paces I did not take during those fifty days of lockdown. Which is 341.45 kilometers! Like the sleepless nights, this cannot be recovered. But it’s so impressive! For now, I have to start by getting out my shoes to prepare to reconnect with Earth. Since childhood, there is nothing that I love so much as to feel the different surfaces of the ground under my feet. The foot, "this masterpiece of engineering, this work of art" as Leonardo da Vinci said. Both together, a marvel of 48 bones that supports and guides me, without even thinking about it.
341.45 kilometers, on foot: what a beautiful journey it would be! From here or elsewhere. Then, like a godless pilgrim, I might come back here to tell the tale of this adventure. Until then, take care of yourself and your loved ones and keep safe!
This is very unusual for me. As far back as I can remember, I only look at the results of my shots weeks or even months later - whether in analogue or photographic mode. Apart from commissions, such as portraits, wanting to look at my work straight away can also be linked to the "imminence of disappearance" , the urgent need to save a trace before the subject is lost forever. This is the case with my Breathe series devoted to flowers at the end of their lives, whose only purpose is to keep the memory of their passage through the house.
As I write these lines, I realise that if I was quick to look at the result of a Breathe shooting, it is probably due to its principle of closing my eyes while I capture the photograph.
This confinement has therefore allowed me to question the particular link between photography and memory in my work. It was something I hadn't particularly thought about. I believed that I was only interested in the act of photographing in the moment without really caring about the result. Which is, of course, not true.
If the relationship between photography and memory is obvious, its mechanism is particular to me. Thus, for me, a photograph is very rarely a supportformemory. Forvariousreasons,probably linked to my childhood, that doesn't interest me. On the contrary, time seems to act directly on these photographs. Sometimes it is "chemically" right: it can happen that the films or slides alter. In digital photography mode, I also feel this when I open SD cards that have been left aside for a long time. So as far as my photos taken over the years in the Middle East are concerned, the ones that will hold my attention are those that are the least "documentary", those that include accidents of light or colour.
Carnation, ‘Breathe’ Series, 2019
Rose Variation I, ‘Breathe’ Series, 2019
Memory is a construction: it is as if its foundations also give meaning to my photographs. So the narrative is not built from reality. The photographs become the markers of my own fiction. As if the 'oblivion' of these photographs had defacto reinforced the subjectivity of my gaze. As if time had mysteriously acted on them to restore the feeling and the state of mind in which I was when I took this or that photo, and which I remember perfectly. This is what I wish to restore.
Before this lockdown, I had begun to sense this through my Transfulgurances (Dazzling Journey) series started in 2019, when a nasty shoulder break had deprived me of travel and left me grounded at home, suitcases and camera relegated to the sideline.
The same goes for the State of Nature series, which began in January 2020. The consciousness of my manner of working allowed me to continue in a more assertive way on these series, sometimes by combining different places taken in different times or by colouring certain black and white photos, according to what my memory required.
In November 2020, three photos from Transfulgurances were chosen and put up for sale in support of women artists affected by confinement through the Friends of the NMWA (National Museum of Women in the Arts) committee, which I am quite proud of: the creativity linked to my own frustration of not travelling could be a concrete support to other women artists prevented from working!
Today I would say that this period of confinement has paradoxically allowed me more freedom in my work thanks to a more conscious approach to my individuality, which, by revealing itself, has ceased to be a burden and has been transformed into a greater source of creativity.
www.saatchiart.com/sandrabeauchard
‘State of Nature’ , V, 2020-2021
‘State of Nature’ , V1, 2020-2021
