Nomophobia and the street : the street photography of Laurent Delhourme
Okay… I admit to being fascinated…
We step back…and…November 28, 2007, we are in the Orange Store on 125 Avenue des Champs – Élysées, Paris, France. The first ever iPhone, the 2G – later renamed the iPhone 1 to differentiate it from what was to come – is on sale and the shop is packed out with hundreds of people.
Street photographer Laurent Delhourme is witness to the start of this revolution and like all good photographers he notices such things.
March 2021…
We are all now addicts, hooked on our smartphones. It is the last thing we check at night and the first thing we look at in the morning.
Copyright ⓒ Laurent Delhourme
As if to make the point a woman, in a packed train, has her smartphone held right up to her face. It is as if she is intent on shutting out the rest of the world and her focus is solely on the digitalised universe that she now finds herself immersed in. She doesn’t seem to care what is happening in the carriage around her. She is having her fix and nothing, it would appear, can tear her away from her mobile communications.
Maybe a friend has taken a snap of their breakfast and is sharing? Maybe it is a shot of someone she follows on Facebook or Instagram. They are on holiday on a beach in some sun-drenched faraway land. The lives of others seem so perfect, in comparison to that of the lady on the Paris Métro, taking the 11-minute, line 12 ride from Abbesses to Concorde on a cold morning.
“I made a report on the launch of the first iPhone in France,” Laurent told me. “I understood that we were going through a technological revolution, I saw that our lives were going to change. I quickly became interested in the behaviour of people with their smartphones. The Nomophobia series was born!”
Copyright ⓒ Laurent Delhourme
This for me, is really smart!
A man in an underground station is pulling his case behind him while he has his head down transfixed, perhaps mesmerised, by the smartphone in his hand.
Do you find yourself wondering if it is an iPhone, a Samsung Galaxy, a Huawei?
Yeah? Me too!
The really interesting thing about this photo is the interconnection between the man and the woman in the poster and how Delhourme has fused the two.
He (the man) is, apparently, being watched by a shocked-looking woman from a poster. The woman is exasperated, presumably by the smartphone generation – ‘why aren’t they interested in me? I modelled for this poster’ – and has her hand across her face. The woman, however, has her fingers open to allow one eye to witness this very human obsession with mobile phones.
Both shots are from Laurent’s super series Nomophobia. A documentary grouping of photographs telling the tale of our total absorption in the digital world of smartphones.
“I continue day after day,” he continues. “To look at my fellow human beings with their mobile phones and to photograph them. I would like
to develop this series on a larger scale and continue it in other countries, other cultures, but currently with the COVID it is complicated to travel.”
Laurent Delhourme reminds me of the time I flew out to Vienna, Austria to interview his fellow French photographer Laetitia Vancon. And I wish I could say I was chatting to Delhourme over Cappuccinos at Cafe Marlette on the Rue des Martyrs, Montmartre, Paris, but, as he says, alas – coronavirus!
Our rendezvous determined by the time in which we live and the small spaces that have become accustomed to as our temporary boundaries.
Pandemic or not, his photography is captivating, thought-provoking and I am curious.
Copyright ⓒ Laurent Delhourme
It is the glance of the man with the pipe – is he saying (with his eyes) ‘What are you looking at?’ or, as they say in Paris : ‘Qu’est ce que tu regardes?’.
Allez?
“I’m looking for unique moments,” Laurent says gently. “I love the feeling of having taken a photo that I could never take again. I am not looking for contact with people, on the contrary I am as discreet as possible so as not to disturb the scene I am photographing.
“In my images there is always…humour… incongruity and poetry. But, above all, it’s the emotions that count. It’s like a drug to me.”
Similar to our addiction to smartphones?
“Every day when I go out in the street,” he adds. “I always have my camera with me, so I never miss a photo.”
Copyright ⓒ Laurent Delhourme
What Delhourme captures is a world in the process of unfolding in front of us that is, for me, his photographic art.
In one shot, a young couple kiss by some steps while their friend captures the moment on her smartphone through a small hoop – an artistic device?
Copyright ⓒ Laurent Delhourme
In another, a woman and her daughter stare at a museum poster for The Neanderthal era of human development. Art looking at art, but notice the shadow of a man in the right-hand corner of the frame. Is something sinister about to happen?
In November 2019 Laurent Delhourme’s Macadam Paname went on exhibition at the International Fair Paris Photo at the Grand Palais, while his book of the same name was released in September 2020. Every photo in the exhibition, as well as the book, responding to the one next to it in a kind of visual storytelling sequence.
Delhourme set out on his photographic journey in 1989 turning professional in 1994.
“I started in Bordeaux in my home town,” he explained. “At the age of 25 I moved to Paris. Originally I was in fashion and then I turned to portraiture for advertising and publishing.”
Influenced by Elliot Erwin, Delhourme claims that he is more of a humanist photographer than a street photographer. I can understand that and, if memory serves me, ‘humanist photography’ is a genre which was developed by French photographers.
But I have difficulty with the term and the boundaries between humanist and street photography – no doubt there will be somebody out there who will be quite happy to put me straight – but perhaps this is a philosophical enterprise for another day?
Copyright ⓒ Laurent Delhourme
Meantime, outside Nello restaurant on 696 Madison Avenue, New York City, 12 dapper looking oversized Teddy Bears chat cheerfully as they wait for their orders to be served. A coach, day- trip from Albany? Some 244km (152 miles) from The Big Apple?
In colour this shot gives us a sense of Delhourme’s humour.
“I have always been attracted by the work of Cartier-Bresson, Robert Franck, Garry Winogrand…,” he starts up again. “Through their photographs I loved the emotions I felt, and the freedom of expression. This is exactly what I look for in my street work. I also seek to document my time and keep track of what I experience on a daily basis with my gaze.”
Laurent Delhourme is never conventional but he is a thinking photographer. There is a philosophy to the way he approaches his work – humanist, documentary or street photographer.
“I rarely play with the light,” he says referring to how he likes to operate on the street. “I prefer a slightly hazy sun rather than a very strong sun. But what counts is the action after I adapt to the light.
“When I can, and that I have the time, I am attentive to the composition of my photos, but very often the action is so fast that I do not have time to be very precise in my framing. I shoot on instinct; you have to be quick – I don’t have time to ask myself questions. Despite everything, I hardly ever re-frame my photographs.”
In the end it doesn’t matter what genre of photography he works in; the importance lies in the work itself.
And isn’t it ironic that our mobile phones are now one of the main mediums for taking photographs in modern society? That fact has never lost on Laurent Delhourme.
Let’s just say his street work holds a certain humanist quality?
*Laurent Delhourme works with Leica equipment (QP and MP-240) and lenses 28, 35 and 50mm. He never uses a tripod and prefers wide angle photos with little depth of field. His post processing is done on Photoshop and Silver Effex Pro.
To see & know more, Visit Laurent Delhourme
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