Space is frozen in time. On the walls a pale pink terracotta that is still found in some bathrooms spared from the renovation. On the floor, a tricolor tiling that smells good of the 90s. And on the external façade, eleven letters are displayed roughly in a typeface typical of these places: LAVOMATIC. It is in this strange laundry-scented space that Tanguy Carrée spent most of her nights this week. Passionate about photography, this 24-year-old from Rennes is currently leading a series called Washing lights which takes shape inside the Rennes laundries. A very student city, the Breton capital has offered him a good package of lairs of washing machines to explore. He chose eight in which he dragged his friends out of the cinema to “invent many stories”.
This strange decor idea came to him before summer and brought back some memories from high school. “I was at Jeanne-d’Arc’s and we often went to buy snacks with our friends. When it rained, we went to the laundromat next door. It is a special place, which everyone knows or has used at one time or another. A place that mixes generations. Laundromats are so rich. With all the cars lined up, it has a look, “slips the young photographer. He also remembers Thursday nights when people used to meet to play in the back of big square cars.
From Tuesday he spends most of his nights there, with the consent of the owners, to carry out what he describes as the greatest project of his young career as a photographer. Living in the evening, Tanguy Carrée had already got used to it when he was a night watchman for taxes, on the sidelines of the film studies he followed during the day at ESRA. An intense pace of life that had forced him to give up the canoeing career in which he had been surrounded since childhood. For a few years he has swapped paddles with the camera or the camera, chaining together small personal projectsall connected by the image.
A foam machine in Sainte-Anne
For this new series he armed himself with very colorful lights and outfits, having fun diverting the furniture of the washing machines to recreate a bit kitschy universes. Here, a weightlifter appears to be dancing in a nightclub. There, a woman succumbs to an overdose of detergent. A little further on, two elderly people sit in old armchairs in front of a cathode ray television. In Sainte-Anne, where he was on Thursday evening, the young photographer even brought a foam machine among the metal drums. “We want to recreate an imaginary world in a universe that everyone knows,” explains Rennais, who likes to play with the boundary between real and unreal.
The night shooting will end on Tuesday evening before giving way to the retouching and special effects work that the photographer will carry out with his friends. Cliché that he should exhibit in January in Rennes, but that he would then like to travel. And why not decorate the decrepit walls of the laundries?
