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As part of their partnership, the newspaper Le Soir and the Musée de la Photographie have launched the Galerie du Soir. Alongside each new major exhibition at the Museum, the Galerie du Soir presents a young artist to discover. It’s a gamble on the future in four ways: a small but significant display at the Museum, a portfolio in the magazine Photographie ouverte, a presentation of the photographer in the pages of Le Soir and a selection of his or her work on the website www.lesoir.be.

For this latest edition of the Galerie du Soir, we chose Fañch Le Bos. Bodies wrapped in plastic and stored in aseptic storage cubicles... Fañch Le Bos’s universe is strange to say the least, combining formal beauty, absurd situations and skilfully distilled humour. A recent graduate of La Cambre, this Parisian of Breton origin discovered photography rather late in life. «It’s a world I really got to grips with when I started studying at the Beaux-Arts in Brest,» he says. «Before that, my first approach to this world was through video. I grew up with a father who was a scriptwriter, so I was very close to the cinema. As a child, I used to play with little cameras and make short films. As an only child, I didn’t have any brothers or sisters to play with, so it was my default hobby.»

After secondary school, he went on to study at the Beaux-Arts in Brest, following in the footsteps of his father who had returned to live in Brittany. «In the first year, you discover a bit of every medium, including photography, which I really started to enjoy. I could express my ideas more easily than in a screenplay, and then there was the fact that I could freeze the image and put it on the wall. So, after the Beaux-Arts, I decided to do a master’s degree in photography.»

He was also quick to prefer creating his own world to documentary photography. «When I was a kid, from about the age of 6 to 13, I did a lot of theatre in a small company in Paris. I always enjoyed it. In photography, I very quickly gravitated towards things like the strange worlds of Gregory Crewdson.»

After Paris and Brest, he continued his training in Brussels. «I’d always been attracted to Belgium and Brussels, the atmosphere of the city, the people... And then at La Cambre, I found myself with other students who were passionate about the same medium as me, whereas at Beaux-Arts I was with sculptors, ceramists... I wanted and needed these exchanges with people exploring the same practices.»

After a bit of trial and error, he found his way: «Basically, it all started with a photograph of bodies in washing machines. I didn’t really have a precise idea in mind, no clear project. The bodies weren’t really in the machines. For this image, I used my own body, but I also called on the services of a friend. When I saw the result, I said to myself that I liked the strangeness of it. I was interested in the absurd and the offbeat, and I wanted to explore that vein.»
He therefor started looking for places that would inspire him. «At the start, it wasn’t clear what I wanted to do. It became clearer after the images had been made. It was more of an instinctive approach to places that inspired me, where I wanted to shut myself away. Places that attracted me graphically.»

Gradually, he realised that these places generated a series of requirements, making the whole thing quite performative. He also decided to use his body exclusively for his productions. «I was looking for a balance between the absurdity of the situations and the beauty of the image. Little by little, I came to do everything myself. It’s something I’ve been doing since I was a kid, and I like it. I liked the fact that I had to take over the space, find the right position and contort myself. I also realised that if I put other people on stage, it automatically gave rise to a series of questions: why people of such and such an age, of such and such a skin colour, of such and such a morphology? But that’s not the point. With my body as the only base material, I get rid of all that.» Ten years of intense athleticism have also enabled him to take on the physical challenge of the poses he inflicts on himself to produce his images.
In the space of two years, his work has matured, evolving from a series of impressive images that were a bit all over the place to a perfectly coherent set based around the famous boxes. «The subject of the series is our relationship with the body in today’s world, particularly in the face of technological advances. How do we define our body envelope today? Is it still useful or is it becoming obsolete? We delegate the use of our senses to GPS and other software, and our relationship with others is mediated by social networks and dating apps...»

Rather than turning his work into a documentary, Fañch Le Bos uses constructed images to symbolise these issues. «I approach the subject with humour and derision. I found it particularly interesting to place these bodies in cubicles with various other objects. In these places, known as furniture repositories, we put everything that is non-living, packed with varying degrees of care.»

Between a bust of Hercules and a garden gnome, we can make out these bodies frozen in various types of packaging. It’s a sombre vision, but one that doesn’t abandon all hope. «If they’re there, it’s because they’re no longer of use. But also, as with an old armchair or an antique lamp, because we tell ourselves that it could it be used again one day.»