Sanctuaire

This astonishing black and white work feels like rainy memories, diluting over time. The premise of incorporating the feeling of mortality into the fabric of the photographs is a gamble that absolutely paid off. Scenes of praying pilgrims, as timeless as the desire of something more to life than a simple ending, a universal and timeless endeavour, a substantial human fear, and ground for philosophies. Elie mastered to convey the doubt, the strive and the circularity of this occult occurrence in images that appear from another time or from all times or none at all.
Words by Gomma (Laura Estelle Barmwoldt)

Artist statement: Lourdes is known for its low grey skies, for its pilgrims seeking penance or health to the daylong rhythm of ave marias, and for the merchants in the temple who make of the city the second tourist destination in France. Religious trinkets are everywhere, even in restaurants and hotels. But the faithful who come from all over the world are clearly looking for something else. A spiritual and absolute place where they can address their appeals, their supplications, and offer their devotion. Walking through Lourdes, mingling with pilgrims, attending ceremonies, day after day I tried to discover the universal element in the physical and spiritual exaltation promised by a sacred place. But how can one articulate the ineffable? How can one see the invisible? How can one observe the moment when radical otherness appears in a blinding flash? Sanctuaire is the hallucinatory and mystical vision of human life torn between fragility and hope. For the theologian, mystery sets the limits of knowledge. But mystery is ceaselessly challenged by power relations— between the secular world and clerical institutions- that are part and parcel of all religious life. For the photographer, that mystery is contained in the other beings before him. To meet and photograph the other requires more than simply finding common ground. That otherness must be preserved, so as to make way for a new way of seeing. A true meeting is always a revelation. At the end, Sanctuaire offers a meditation on the possibility of mystery for humans torn between the certainty of their ending and the promise of eternal life.