HAUT LES CŒUR

For the past fifteen years or so, Stéphanie Lacombe has been engaging with the everyday lives of the women and men of Hauts-de-France; her series Immobile home, Hyperlife, and Somme toute evoke memories of childhood and cinema: highway rest stops, campgrounds, hypermarket parking lots, working-class neighborhoods… become settings for intimacy, social comedies, or adolescent outbursts, while remaining anchored in a harsh economic reality.

Driven by a clear-eyed commitment, Stéphanie focuses on the precarious owners of mobile homes, hypermarket customers, temporary workers, in order to shed light on invisible lives. Her images challenge clichés about poverty and show people who work hard, tinker, help one another, and invent a thousand strategies.

Her fondness for others leads her to take the time to meet them: she involves her subjects, adjusts poses, lighting, gestures, to offer them a representation worthy of their trust, transforming the construction of an image into a shared political and poetic gesture.

Drawing from testimonies and confidences, she crafts short texts that accompany the images like intertitles from a silent film, thickening their surface. Thus, the voices of those who speak of “what’s left to live on” rather than purchasing power evoke a shared newspaper subscription, beach towels on the sidewalk, Sunday steak, or oysters from Aldi.

Stéphanie Lacombe’s “little world” rekindles the golden light of childhood vacations, starlet games on the asphalt, or shopping cart races, and gathers into a basket of images and words a collection of little joys wrested from the roughness of reality.

You can buy the photobook HAUT LES CŒUR HERE