Slipping Through My Fingers - Agathe Berjaut in FIGURES Photography Magazine

In a poetic way, it could be described as “Looking at Time passing through images of familiar settings, gestures and faces.”

Artist : Agathe Berjaut

Series : Slipping Through My Fingers

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This personal ongoing photographic series started with the departure of her father in 2021, when the artist started capturing the ephemeral scenes of the familial universe with her father’s old analog camera, in an attempt to make sense of the transience of life and exploring the boundaries of time, memories, and legacy. In a poetic way, it could be described as “Looking at Time passing through images of familiar settings, gestures and faces.”

With her photographs, she steals these fragments of time, real and spontaneous moments in life, as they come, worried not so much with the final result, as with being there, present. This is evident in her daily life, as she tries to always have her camera around, ready to capture those fleeting scenes in an instinctive way. In order to do this, you need to be fully immersed and living in the moment, and at the same time, distance yourself from it, as a photographer. Perhaps the biggest challenge of this series, this tension between roles, between art and life, is dissolved by the artist: I will never overstep my role as a mother for a good shot.

While it may have started dealing with more somber themes, such as death, loss and grief, it has evolved to explore and include others. Love, tenderness, a sense of beauty, femininity are important factors in my work, they are genuinely linked to my personality. I need to be moved emotionally by what I see in order to capture it.

Agathe can’t create when in pain. Even if the hardships of life have helped her dive into analog processes, she needs a certain harmony, beauty, even joy, to convey the life she lives and sees. Her gaze, definitely influenced by being a woman and a daughter, is shaped by her being a mother (of two daughters) – deeply connected with the fragile, the ephemeral and the real. The love I have for my people is what you should hear coming out of the photographs. Both still life and the human body are the subjects with which she portrays her life and the life that surrounds her, creating a language of the poetics of the ordinary.