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-----Irwin Barbé / Lost at E Minor, Sweet and Sound, Mashkulture...
There were posts about about me on
- Lost at E Minor
- L’instant des
- Common People
- Mashkulture
- Sweet and Sound
- Therefore
- Fragments of Freedom
here are some extracts of the interviews :
Some words about you?
I’m 17 years old, I shoot videos and pictures. I like the summer breeze, concrete buildings in eastern cities, and boyish girls. I’m home-schooled because I used to go on a lot of movie shootings, but this year, I have to study more because of school exams.
How does your days look like?
I get up round 9pm if I can, I drink some tea and then I do my school work. I often fall asleep, because I can’t sleep at night. In the afternoon I try to do some more shoal work because I was not effective at all during the morning. I drink some more tea, I go out to smoke a few cigarettes. Around 6pm, I go on the internet, I download mp3 on music blogs, I write some emails. In the evening I go to judo or badminton trainings. When I come back at home, I listen to Bernard Lenoir’s music show on France Inter. Then I read some nineteenth century French literature. I send texts. I listen to the music I have been downloading during the day. I go out, basically I waste my time. I could do all my school work fast, and then have a lot of free time, but I don’t. I don’t think enough about my short film scripts and my photographs either.
Present or two pictures of yours and one or two of someone else?
Among all my pictures, this is the one I like the most. It was last summer in Biarritz (France). We spent a week with all our friends, living in the same house with no adults. We were there to shoot a video for my friend Luna’s fashion label, Venus In Furs. It was a great time. However, I don’t know what was happening to us, but it was as if we were stoned all-day long. We were totally numb, unproductive. For example, this picture was taken after a sleepless night, spent smoking and watching awful music videos on TV. We were all feeling depressed and tired. At dawn, we went up on the roof and watched the sunrise. I had my polaroid camera with me and I just snapped the moment. That’s why I like this photograph so much : it’s absolutely spontaneous.
This is a video from A Swedish Love Story, a 1970 movie by Roy Andersson. It’s about two fifteen year-old teenagers who fall in love during the summer vacations. They don’t talk much, but they’re so innocent, contrary to all the adults in the movie, who are totally depressed. It’s amazing how beautiful this film is : all the lights are natural, it has a very ingenuous quality. I also noticed a lot of similarities between the lifestyle of the kids in A Swedish Love Story and the the kids of my generation : they smoke, they drink alcohol, and go out in clubs, but in a nice way. For example, our way of life is much closer to this movie than to Larry Clark’s Kids or Uli Edell’s Christiane F.
The problem is that, after the success of A Swedish Love Story, Roy Andersson became depressed too. He then directed a lot of commercials, and his latest movies (like Songs From The Second Floor) are nothing like A Swedish Love Story. They are darker, more claustrophobic.
Tell us a story, a feeling connected to Photography?
I realize that I’ve never lived anything truly interesting while photographing or filming. That’s why the most
important moments were the one during which I succeeded to capture something true. For example, these
pictures are real. When you look at them you see the boredom, the inadequacy that I feel most of the time.
Somebody wrote that the people in my pictures seemed « lost and cold ». I liked it.
Next Stop?
I’m going to Paris in a week to take the TOEFL test and to film a concert of The Drums. That’s not really
exciting. In April, I’m going to Warsaw with a lot of friends, this should be cool. though I know that once again, my hopes are too high. We’ll end up trashing ourselves in clubs and doing nothing productive. Hopefully I will get at least some rad party pictures.
Random words?
atmospheric lights+stand at the window and cry+street lamps+sleepwalking in the snow+their cheeks were
pressed together as they danced+TV nostalgia+hollow life+feelings of tenderness and hopelessness+
A song?
The Field Mice – Sensitive, Emma’s House. These songs will never age, there are so delicate and melancholic.
Listening to them makes me want to stay a teenager forever. It makes me want to fall in love too, but that
doesn’t seem to happen. There were so many cute bands at the end of the eighties, like Black Tambourine,
The Monochrome Set, The Wake, The Honeymooners and so on.
