Olivier Lavenac

HEIRS

The sculpture of Shakespeare by Raphael Maklouf and Hayley Gibbs, located in the Shoreditch district of London and playfully crowned with a cap by Moussa and his friends, became the starting point of Heirs. In this gesture, I perceived an inverted transmission: a younger generation opening a window onto its own world for those who came before. When I photograph these adolescents, an encounter takes place, but the portrait establishes a distance. What appears is not an interior life as such, but a presence that belongs to the image itself, a surface where the relation between subject, photographer, and viewer remains unresolved.