“It is only with the heart that one can see rightly, what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

Lucie does not just « take » photos. She is not a mere bystander. She does not simply pass on the emotions she encounters, rather she lives the moment and generously shares it with us. Likewise, her photos bring alive such moments : a conversation with a stranger in Bolivia, a whisper in Guatemala, a drop of dew on a fern leaf in the Oise forest. Each picture calls for dialogue, each is an essay, a novel, an unusual story told by a friend, a stranger or a cobblestone upon which Hugues Capet may have trodden.

Born in St Nazaire in 1964 on the French West coast, she first expressed this talent early on in her life through her way of looking at the world and the beauty surrounding her. By natural progression she was drawn to modern language studies. Other ways of communication, self-expression and the breaking down of barriers became vital to her, first drawing and then in her teens, photography.

Lucie has a passion for ordinary people and their lives. She is fascinated by family likenesses. A picture of faces standing out against a black background bears witness to family love, the kinship of a father’s slightly aquiline nose or a dimple on his cheek reflected in his son. She shows the meaningful glance exchanged between a grandmother and her grand-daughter. She describes with amusement family trees and the complicity between generations.

The photographs she brings back from her numerous stays and journeys abroad become veritable “carnets de voyages” in which passing images of the characters she met and caught on film come alive again, just as fresh snow shows the traces of one’s passage.

Lucie’s photographs are not to be looked at simply with one’s eyes but with the heart. Whether she develops her prints in black and white –her “magic moments”- or whether lets the film or digital colours dance, her settings, foregrounds, backgrounds and focal points express true talent. The sensitivity with which these photographic dialogues are treated brings them alive.

Next summer, Lucie will launch herself and her family into a new adventure in Mexico, where the ancient stones of Picardy will be superceded by haciendas and Sunday hats by sombreros.

Though she is leaving us for the “New World”, we have not seen the last of Lucie and her photographic talents will continue to charm us.