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Photographer: Alain Laboile @alainlaboile

All photographs copyright Alain Laboile. REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED, means that the resale and reproduction, even partial, in any manner and form, of Alain Laboile’ photographs are prohibited. Anyone wishing to use the contents must have to ask in any case written authorization to Alain Laboile.

Wrought-iron craftsman, photographer and father to six children, Alain Laboile started a family album in 2007, at the age of 39. His“La Famille” series was, at first, a private treasure. This self-taught photographer who only possesses one picture of his own childhood simply wished to record the passing of time with his family. The family album quickly goes beyond the private setting and seduces the web.  Tens of thousands of internet users all over the world await, daily, the new images of this French“tribe”insolently living on the edge of the world. In December 2012, the New York Times celebrates Alain Laboile’s talent. The first exhibitions ensue in Japan and the United States, then in France in 2014 when the“La Famille” series joined the Musée français de la photographie collection. Alain Laboile’s work has since been exhibited around the world and he recently published a second book with Kehrer Verlag : “Summer of the fawn.

Alain Laboile brings us through the pictures of his six children, fragments of a refuge where childhood extends as the seasons pass. While his photographic vocabulary might recall the likes of Sally Mann, the story he tells is different. Not an anthropologist nor a socio-analyst, he creates through his photographs the cosmogony of his family. Out of the accepted norm, his children embrace nature at large: their own as much as the one that surrounds them. Beyond documenting their childhood, Laboile writes a visual poem of innocence where the environment plays a full-fledged role in the narration. The rustle of dry leaves, the splashes of the water the mewing of cats, fuse with the children’s bursts of laughter, shouts and whispers. Detached from the ambient anxiety, Laboile’s images radiate with their intrinsic instantaneity and simplicity.