Frank Lebon is fascinated by blood. It’s the connecting theme that flows via his first artwork e-book, One Blood, a photographic venture that takes us via the Covid-19 pandemic, a sort 1 diabetes prognosis, and love, household and friendship.
“I’m all the time accumulating some form of imagery, however very not often do I really feel it’s worthy of sharing with the world,” the 30-year-old photographer and film-maker says from his brilliant and ethereal studio in south London. “With One Blood, I felt an actual sense of serendipity, the place all these connecting issues got here collectively to present it worth and that means.”
For the previous decade, Lebon’s work has noticed themes of loss of life, household and the downright banal, subverted via his meticulous modifying type: typically, a portrait is scribbled over, torn aside and restitched, at occasions paying homage to American counterculture figures corresponding to Jim Goldberg, Larry Clark and Concord Korine. His brief movies, in the meantime, have documented a crime-scene cleaner, London squats and a canine that had witnessed a homicide. His work is usually laced with a darkish sense of humour, and Lebon has change into a cult determine within the London artwork scene – in addition to producing advert campaigns for manufacturers together with Gucci and Dior.
One Blood started in early 2020, when Lebon’s finger inadvertently lined half the flash of his digital digital camera whereas taking a photograph of his mum, Camilla, washing the picture in a luminous pink gentle. For many, it could be a soon-deleted mishap. “It jogged my memory of blood,” Lebon says, transferring his finger over the glad accident. “I like how the moon within the background provides the photograph context, that I haven’t simply dialled up the pink.”
Lebon ordered blood testing kits and taught himself easy methods to take samples from his personal physique. A couple of days later, he grew to become critically unwell; he was exhausted, dehydrated and urinating as much as 40 occasions a day. He took himself to his native GP and met a junior physician on her first ever shift. She didn’t know easy methods to administer a blood check – however Lebon did, and ended up educating her within the physician’s room.
“It was like a sign that pointed me to the course of creating One Blood,” Lebon says – he was finally recognized with kind 1 diabetes. Prompted by the isolation of the pandemic, in addition to the Black Lives Matter protests that erupted that locked-down summer time, Lebon began desirous about greater existential questions. “Wanting again, I believe an enormous a part of all the selections I made for this venture was this concept that we’re all linked, and that beneath the floor we’re all the identical – all of us have blood operating via us.”
One Blood flicks via intimate moments taken prior to now three years. There’s Lebon’s girlfriend sleeping in mattress; his bare dad (photographer Mark Lebon); his mum rolling a cigarette. And there are mundane scenes, too: a derelict park; avenue views of a hospital; blood donor transit bikes. Then, as Lebon calls them, the “blood portraits”, of pals and family members with a garish pink gentle forged over their faces, imitating the unique accident that kicked off the venture. Amongst these are microscopic pictures of blood samples he had collected from his topics.
The venture can be influenced by French surrealist photographer Jacques-André Boiffard. Lebon first noticed his work at a 2014 retrospective on the Pompidou Centre in Paris, but it surely wasn’t till the making of One Blood that the photographer rediscovered his works and started making connections along with his personal apply. Among the many similarities are Boiffard’s concentrate on themes of loss of life, his comically grotesque closeup shot of an enormous toe – Lebon as soon as spent a time period photographing his personal huge toe after he broke it – and medical examinations of blood.
“It was so spot-on with the work that I used to be doing,” Lebon says. This photographer that I’ve been subconsciously linked to since I used to be 20 had made the most important impression on me. And right here I used to be, doing one thing that he did again then. While you make these connections, it’s like a second of enlightenment.”
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