"From Cairo to Rome, from Hollywood to Babelsberg, from Paramount to Fox, Laure Vasconi has wandered, strolled, dreamed, always armed with her now natural prosthesis, the camera. In studios that are more or less active, dormant, or even abandoned, she has observed the backstage of the dream factories of the 20th century, captured the backside, the folds, the unconscious of cinema, and the off-screen of films. In premises that are often deserted, but sometimes populated by a few employees, invisible but indispensable ants of the great cinema hive, she has never stopped photographing what the crowds never see: the gaping hole of cinema, the latency between films, before or after they are made. Empty hangars, trestles, picture rails, machinery, dressing rooms, closets, drawers, costumes, wigs, mannequins form the sunken world, the obscure labyrinth, the amniotic liquid of the life of the films, always hidden from public view. Geologist, speleologist, explorer of the cinema, Laure Vasconi thus operates a work of unveiling, revealing the hidden entrails of the greatest machine of fantasies of the last hundred and twenty years. 120 years is a long time, and it is also this canonical age, this possible agony that the photographer records, producing the last traces of an art and a world, of a "cottage industry" in the process of being submerged by the digital era. 

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Documenting the backstage of an art in full mutation is also producing a kind of film in still images, it is prolonging the magic of cinema and its power of evocation: such is the paradoxical art of Laure Vasconi, such is the moving beauty of her series on the big studios. "

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Text Serge Kaganski