Aurélie Lagoutte, is a French photographer based in east London. She started her creative foray as a make up artist at the age of 16. In no time, she was travelling around Europe assisting a major player in the MUA field on editorial shoots, TV sets and fashion weeks. Yet this proximity with the human face and stare was as unsettling for her as was forging one’s look to fit an over-defined definition of beauty at a given point in time.
Meeting with photographer Sébran D’Argent on a photo shoot, she fell enamoured with his process using a very old box camera and Polaroid. So, behind a camera, she found a perfect spot to hide from people’s stare; with film photography she found truth; and with very old cameras, a dreamy aesthetic. Self-taught, Aurélie’s attraction to photography does not come as a choice but rather as a salvation, a need rather than a passion, an emotion rather than a thought, hence fending off everlasting explanations for curious scholars.
As a young artist, she admires the works of Sali Mann, Paolo Reversi, Mapplethorpe, David Hamilton and Bruce Willis in the movie “The Good Samaritan”, although she admits this may be useless here… She does very little retouching, adopting more of a “cleaning brush stroke” than an actual correction process, empowering flaws rather than shamefully smoothing them out: What you see is what you get.
