Transition To A Fragmented World Through Lauren Marsolier’s Layered Photographs

Marsolier’s work blurs the boundary between real and fake; her landscape images look as if captured from a simulated environment. This is precisely her intention: “I wanted the work to explore tensions between what feels familiar, natural, and what feels alien or fabricated”, Marsolier explained in an interview. The artificial landscapes she constructs are designed to be confusing, by challenging the viewer’s notion of what is real. To “The lack of human presence evokes to me a world that is getting increasingly mechanized and virtualized”create these images, Marsolier takes multiple images at a variety of locations over a long period of time, and later combines them using digital collages and photoshop. These multi-layered images become a single intriguing frame. The simple compositions have a subdued color palette and shallow depth of field, and are always devoid of subjects—an element that contributes to their eerie nature. “The lack of human presence evokes to me a world that is getting increasingly mechanized, virtualized and removed from direct human interactions,” she explains. Thus, the impression of artificiality comes as much from the elements that Marsolier chooses to insert as from the placement of their own existence. “Liberated from the single point of view of traditional photography”, she explains, the altered images in Transition facilitate “a new visual vocabulary [to] emerge”. This collection of images has also been published in a photo book of the same name, click here to read more.