Marie Clerel gives herself over to strange actions. She gets up in the middle of the night to work before the first rays of sunshine, when she so badly needs them. She spends hours observing the effects of the sparkling of water on the bright curve that etches unpredictably on the studio walls. On a cold day – the weather forecast had predicted “scattered showers” – she was seen sitting on a public bench, waiting. That day, a man actually thought it was a flirting strategy, and when he finally decided to come closer, she got up. Exactly twenty minutes on the bench, not one minute more. These attitudes, singular to say the least, can be linked to those of
the pioneers of photography in the 19th century. The eureka moment of John Herschel; the British inventor of the cyanotype process, can be summed up in one amazed sentence, in the early 1840s: “Light was my first love!” A few decades later, in 1894, August Strindberg started creating Celestographs which were photographic plates that he would expose at night to moonbeams. He complained: “I was nearly put in a lunatic asylum, by lunatics – because I was photographing the sky with no camera or lens”. The Swedish author explained that moonlight makes it possible to create images that look like “the alveoli of honeycomb”, a gourmet coincidence. Just like them, Marie Clerel is not a gentle dreamer, she works: the cyanotypes and other more or less developed images she creates require the constant care and precise attention that drive her to the actions described previously. For example, the Midi series compels her to interrupt any action on a daily basis, in order to expose at a given time a photosensitive piece of paper to rays of sunshine, whether they are powerful – in which case the image will be tinted with a dark shade of blue – or shy, resulting in a paler shade of blue.