Personal

Tributes to my father

December 1, 2016 By Anne-Laure Autin

It is with infinite sadness that I share the passing of my father, Jean-Luc Autin, who closed his eyes for the last time last week on November 22nd. He fought in his last year a courageous battle against a cancer that we always knew to be terminal.

I posted a public tribute to him on the day of his passing on my personal facebook page, I have spoken at his service on Monday, please forgive me as I do not find the strength to do it again here today. Suffice to say that we & I loved him, tremendously.

I want to thank once more all of you who have written me, comforted me and shown me affection. I hope you will know how much I appreciate it.

When we heard about the diagnosis just over a year ago, our lives changed. After a few months, I started a new conceptual body of work called Blood Line. It addresses how terminal illness changes both communication and identity. I am almost done with it, it will be released soon and I have recently shared a sneak peek. But a few weeks ago, I submitted the photo Fluff to two organisations that I love, the Center for Fine Art Photography (C4FAP) in Fort Collins, Colorado and Don’t Take Pictures. I guess I wanted to gauge first impressions.

I heard on Wednesday last week that Don’t Take Pictures was including Fluff in its Masks exhibit, which is on view till February 21st. It was the day after his passing. Yesterday I heard that Fluff will also be part of the Signature Image exhibit at the C4FAP, from March 3rd till April 1st. I am honored and humbled by both news.

I absolutely did not want to document my father’s cancer and I approached this work looking for more universal viewpoints. But I do not forget that it comes from an incredibly personal experience – that this works also stems from him, that it was made about and for him. It therefore feels like an incredible gift from the C4FAP and Don’t Take Pictures to see that Blood Line is already out there in the world thanks to them. They have given me an opportunity to honor my father’s memory this way as well and I am deeply grateful.

Fluff. Pigment ink print, hand-stitched gauze.

New work – sneak peek

October 3, 2016 By Anne-Laure Autin

11 months ago my father nearly passed away from extreme complications on his first chemotherapy round. I was visiting him in France when it happened. After a month in the hospital he finally got home. Less than a week later he was taken back by ambulance with a life threatening infection, and as it happens I also was visiting then. The past year has been tough and I wish I could say that it’s been uphill from there. But that particular day with its particular circumstances has possibly branded me the most. I didn’t leave the hospital thinking I would do work about this; but somehow from that time onward I knew I would eventually.

That same week I had finished the Locked-in series. And 2016 can feel like it’s been a lot about getting that project “out there” – in the past fortnight alone I heard I’m in a show in NYC as well as one in Vermont and in the Berlin Foto Biennale (if you want to see what I’ve been up to in more details, you can check the CV I have recently added to my About page). But I actually spent a lot of my time making new work as well. I just haven’t shown any of it yet. So today I’m changing that with this small preview.

My new project is called Blood Line. It’s still growing and so I won’t share much for now. I can tell you that though it’s about terminal illness, it most certainly is not documentary work. You won’t see my father in any of the photographs. I can tell you that it’s been a profound challenge to address universal questions linked to such a personal experience and to do those justice with conceptual photography – but it’s also been an amazing process that I believe has helped me grow. So I hope you feel something with this first photograph of the series that I am sharing today:

Torn. Pigment ink prints, high gloss varnish.

More on locked-in

June 21, 2015 By Anne-Laure Autin

First can I ask you this: when in your life have you been profoundly scared?

I’ll tell you mine. At 18: I choke on a peanut, unable to breathe while people around me laugh, thinking I’m joking. At 24: my car aquaplanes during a storm on a New York country road and I nearly crash into oncoming traffic. At 28: having just given birth to my first child, I run behind a security guard at 5am unable to keep up as he’s rushing our 17 hours old to the neonatal ICU. She’s in hypothermia and isn’t responsive anymore. At 31: I am in quarantine holding my second child, looking at the tubes and wires attached to her. The pediatrician tells me the oxygen supply will hopefully soon address the cerebral hypoxia caused by the bronchiolitis. He adds that RSV kills infants under 8 weeks old also in another way: their heart sometimes just stops, without a warning. My baby is 7 weeks old. Around 11pm I’m alone with her when all alarms go off – her heartbeat isn’t registering anymore. It happens 5 times that night. At 35: I slip on ice and fall on the back of my head, I feel my brain softly jiggle in my skull and all goes black. Today: I feel locked-in during migraine attacks, unable to move – my mind held prisoner, trying to escape my immobile body.

Is it surprising that all those events were related to the fear of death? After all, there are plenty of other times that we feel scared and they’re not always bad – say, a first kiss. But maybe fear is not the right word. We are nervous, anxious maybe, but we are (hopefully) not actually terrified. When you’re confronted with your mortality or that of your loved ones, you get to know terror.

I know this image looks eerie. It might even be frightening.
Good.
I’m not trying to be cheeky here – but Good indeed 🙂 . Cause I WAS frightened. I was out of my mind terrified… If you feel some kind of anguish or at least discomfort looking at it, then I will have managed in conveying something that resonates deep within me.

This, this is work in progress and I’m told you should never show work in progress and instead wait till the whole series is completed. But it is too important to me and I guess I need to share a bit of it. There is no doubt in my mind that I want to shoot this – I need to shoot this. Better yet I love to shoot this!! If you’re worried about me, please don’t be 😉 First off, this is probably the most “disturbing” photograph I’ve created so far. But mostly, I still like to see the beauty in life – who knows, maybe I’ll also do a series on Love (I’ve got some ideas…)!

Right now though, this stuff excites me and I am finally allowing myself to break free of all kinds of little mental cages I had for myself. So I do hope you love this work, despite or exactly because of its strangeness. Cause I’ll continue exploring this. I have to. Is it part of an healing process? Quite possibly. Is it an artistic release? Absolutely. It is personal? Hell yes. Is it universal? I think it is too.

locked-in

May 31, 2015 By Anne-Laure Autin

About 6 weeks ago, I was in bed with a small migraine when I suddenly felt pins and needles moving up my arms and my tong which started to feel swollen. At the same time one of my arms became intensely warm. That was weird enough that I thought I should call for help but as I was about to, something else happened. It’s hard to describe. I felt like a wave pulsing through me from my head down to my toes and with that, I found myself completely paralysed. I couldn’t move anything anymore – I wanted to, I tried to open my eyes, move my arms, scream… I couldn’t. It didn’t last very long but long enough for it to be incredibly frightening. Tests including a brain MRI, neuro consults and what not seem to point towards a bad case of migraine accompagnée. So no biggie. I don’t worry anymore, the doctors ruled out the two seriously scary stuff they were afraid of and I’m well taken care of. We’re trying to find out the cause but I no longer am overwhelmed by bouts of irrational fear. That locked-in feeling has happened again since though, and in the moment it still scared me in ways I can’t convey.

Life is kinda back to normal. But this whole thing has left some marks on me. I need to deal with that. One way I know how is with my work. This is the first photograph I created as an attempt at doing just that. And I think it’s working…