Anne Lefebvre

Anne Lefebvre was born in 1963 in Boulogne- Billancourt, a town on the outskirts of Paris where Russians who fled the October Revolution settled in 1917. Unable to pronounce the French word, they renamed the town: "Billankoursk,” and the name stuck like tales from an era that Anne sometimes talks about as if she experienced it.

She began taking photographs in the early 1980s, with the belief that the energy conveyed in the prints should always be more important than the subjects in the works. She spent most of her time in darkrooms she had over the years, calculating exposure times, and playing with light and acid baths. The addresses of her studio trace like a poem, the last lines of which would be "Sainte Geneviève des Bois", “Kraczevo” or "Rue de la mare, 33".

Her works seem as if they could have been taken from late 19th-century medical reports, surrealist manifestos, or torn pages from 1960s erotic magazines and there is little or nothing to suggest that they were all made by the same person. Seemingly collected from a novel of neo-gothic tales, stories about ghosts and complicated games of love, in Billankoursk maybe.

Anne Lefebvre lives and works between Igny and Paris.

Curated by Baptiste Pinteaux

Baptiste Pinteaux is a French editor and curator. He co-edits the art journal octopus notes and co-leads the publishing house Daisy. His research currently focuses on the work of the PaJaMa collective, made up of Paul Cadmus (1904-1999), Jared French (1905-1988) and Margaret Hoening French (1906-1998).