Présentation
In Champagne Picarde, as elsewhere in rural France, the shops have deserted the town centres and the bustle of the main streets is fading into the calm of boredom. The
The supermarket, set in the middle of the fields, has become more than just a place to shop, a place to live and a place to meet. The car park, an immense space where most of the local youngsters have learnt to drive, is the realm of cars, intimate spaces that carry people's stories, the ones they tell and the ones we guess. In this place, like a thousand others and with no function other than to gracelessly accommodate the repeated gestures of a disenchanted daily life, Stéphanie Lacombe reconstitutes a human community that seems at first sight to be made up of chance and necessity. There is nothing epic or picturesque about the stories and aspirations she gathers and records. It seems as if everything that could make a rural area legendary - its landscapes, its conviviality, its markets and its home cooking - has been diluted in a setting that now evokes the America of car parks, service stations and pizza machines. The looks inspired by La fureur de vivre, the massive, ramshackle cars, stir up cinematic mythologies, perhaps destined to push back horizons shortened by commercial signs and advertising hoardings. And yet it is here, in the midst of these invisible lives and under a leaden grey sky, at the car doors, on the edge of the bitterness and renunciation that sometimes surface, that Stéphanie Lacombe's photography manages to bring to life the great theatre of small dramas, unreasonable hopes, robust friendships and love stories.