For the past fifteen years or so, Stéphanie Lacombe has been capturing the everyday lives of the people of Hauts-de-France; her series *Immobile Home*, *Hyperlife* and *Somme toute* evoke memories of childhood and cinema: motorway service stations, campsites, hypermarket car parks, working-class neighbourhoods… become settings for intimate moments, social comedies or teenage outbursts, whilst remaining firmly rooted in a harsh economic reality.
Driven by a clear-eyed commitment, Stéphanie focuses on the precarious owners of mobile homes, hypermarket shoppers and temporary workers, to shed light on invisible lives. Her images challenge clichés about poverty and show those who work hard, tinker, help one another and devise a thousand strategies.
Her interest in others leads her to take the time to engage with them: she involves her subjects, adjusting poses, lighting and gestures to offer them a representation worthy of their trust, transforming the creation of an image into a shared political and poetic act.
Drawing on testimonies and confidences, she crafts short texts that accompany the images like intertitles in a silent film, adding depth to their surface. Thus, the voices of those who speak of ‘what remains to be lived’ rather than purchasing power evoke a collective newspaper subscription, beach towels on the pavement, Sunday steak or oysters from Aldi.
Stéphanie Lacombe’s “little world” rekindles the golden light of childhood holidays, games of make-believe on the tarmac or shopping trolley races, and gathers into a basket of images and words a collection of little joys snatched from the harshness of reality.
