"In search of the subject of her reportage (as this is how she defines, in part, her photographic practice) Anne-Lise Seusse scouts out a landscape from which some element has beckoned: for example, the observatory tower at Mont Verdun, near Lyon. Once the initial signal has set a chain of discovery in motion, Anne-Lise begins her investigations into the way in which the newly defined territory is used. This undertaking brings her into a new relationship with the transitory populations who pass through these often uninhabited zones. Without preconceived goals besides the desire to track how non-spaces are modified through use, Anne-Lise moves into reconnoitering mode, taking quick snapshots of actors in the scene to compensate for the slowness of the camera.

The choice of this technique allows for a high quality image, in which the details appear evenly distributed, as they do in the original scene. Despite this claim to reportage, a reportage concerned not with news items as traditionally understood but with seemingly insignificant events, the aesthetic demands made upon the image are high. More than simple acts of witnessing, these viewings of leisure activities (including clay pigeon shooting) construct images out of malleable elements: the rigid verticality of the trees is in tension with the horizontal position of the riders descending the slopes; the red of the bullet-shattered “pigeons” contrasts with the vegetation’s natural hue. On the other hand, these sites, divorced from any history besides that created by their users, through Anne-Lise Seusse’s photography take on a historicity of their own, in which an abandoned wheel evokes the lost shield of a soldier, the outfit of a rider recalls a knight’s armour. These acts of photographic reportage show the rituals underlying a site’s usage, drawn from an inherited logic of confrontation, in which humans consider land an extension of their own activities, steeped in tension and conflict." Pascal Thévenet
[Text translated from French]

studies philosophy, and graduated in 2007 from l’Ecole nationale des beaux-arts in Lyon.
Contact: seusseannelise@yahoo.fr