The photographs of an emerging French photographer depict her fascination with reflections, a feature of her autism.
The photographer, who uses the online name "Luna" to protect her privacy, has been quietly posting her haunting, evocative images in the Flickr photo sharing website for the last two years. With oddly vibrant colors, they show entrancing and disorienting scenes of overlapping images which trap one's eye in layers of meaning.
Like most people with autism, Luna has several fixations -- topics which intensely fascinate her and dominate her thoughts. For Luna, these include cats, reflections, and vegan cooking. All three show up in her photographs, but her most moving images involve the reflections she finds everywhere. She explains that, for her,
"When I'm shooting, I often see the reflection before the thing which made the reflection. The object is not as important as the reflections. What I can see in a puddle is so moving for my soul, I'm melting with happiness!"
Many of her images seem like photo-montages created by combining several other photographs using photo-editing software, but they are not. All of Luna's photographs are actual scenes she has found.
Luna began creating her intriguing, jewel-like images about two years ago with encouragement from an online French autism support group she joined in 2007. In 2009, the group hosted a small gallery showing of Luna's photographs in the city of Brest. She had a second show last year, as part of France's National Autism Awareness Week, and there will be a third show in April, 2011. The group has also self-published a book of Luna's work -- which sold out within two days. A second printing is underway.
Professional photographer Courtney Bent is astonished by the power of Luna's photos. Bent is nationally known for her work putting cameras in the hands of people with significant physical and cognitive disabilities, helping them share their unique visions of the world. Bent's documentary about this work, "Shooting Beauty", has won numerous awards and she has been featured on NBC News and NPR, and in the Boston Herald. She also teaches photography at the college level and does commercial photography. As one might expect, people often approach Bent and ask her to look at a new "amazing" photograph by someone with a disability. Frequently, the work is only mildly interesting. But Luna's work was different: "I wasn't expecting it to make me go "WOW!" It's rare when I see something that is (this) unique and different."
What impresses Bent most is Luna's use of colors.
"She really is a master over her color technique," says Bent, "There is a feeling in her images that there's always a storm brewing. But she manages to find the quiet moment within the storm."
Bent says Luna achieves this calm-before-the-storm effect by stripping out the color in places at the edges of her images while enhancing the interior colors. Her color choices intrigue Bent: "Luna manages to create a warm, neon tone in her images, which seems to be a contradiction of colors. She is able to weave warm tones of yellow and brown with vibrant neon greens and blues to create an inviting, unique color palette."
"She has this amazing ability to create this quiet moment in chaos. It is almost like the chaos is peaceful to her. I'd be curious to find out how she literally views world. It's possible that the outside world appears to be really, really chaotic, and the snap of her camera allows her to create one still moment within the chaos, where the world…. stops… and is finally not moving anymore."
Bent is also impressed that Luna's reflection images have multiple layers or planes of images. "Each little portion is an image within itself. So you are allowed to settle peacefully on each little section, and each little section seems to have its own little story."
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