Photographer Profile: Laurent Chehere

After 14 years as an art director, Laurent Chehere left the ad industry to travel the world and follow his calling – photography. He’s returned to the Paris streets of his childhood to depict the precarious lives of immigrants and the marginalised in a stunning series of fantastical photomontages. The free-thinking photographer tells Carol Cooper how, like his flying houses, he refuses to be tied down

Asked what ambitions he has career-wise, Laurent Chehere replies, “The words ‘ambition’ and ‘career’ are not in my vocabulary.” Considering his success, this might sound like a falsely modest pose, but as the photographer enthuses about the artistic journey he is on, it makes sense. For Chehere is primarily an explorer, motivated not only by travel in the geographical sense, but also by the thrill of creative journeys, flying around the possibilities his art affords like one of his own untethered edifices.

Born in 1972, Chehere grew up in the same scruffy multicultural Paris neighbourhood –Ménilmontant – where he’s now based. He says he was an artistic child: “As far back as I can remember I’ve always wanted to express something with either a drawing or a photo.” He always had cameras as a boy and his mother encouraged him to keep drawing. At 16 he bought his first proper camera, a Nikon FM2, and set about attempting to capture forgotten corners of old Paris, influenced by the pioneering photojournalists/street photographers Robert Doisneau and Eugène Atget.

Though he didn’t go to art college, Chehere continued to teach himself, landed a month’s internship at DDB Paris and was asked to stay on. There, he says, “I learned everything – art direction, graphic design, photography, storytelling, editing – it was a very good school!” After reaching art director level there, Chehere moved on to the Paris offices of CLM BBDO and then Lowe, but after 14 years in the industry he became discouraged. “I was tired of the eternal process of clients destroying a good idea.”

So, in 2006, he set off to see the world, exploring and photographing extensively in Asia and South America. His travels inspired his musings on rootlessness, on the fleeting nature of existence. He also realised that big city dwellers, caught up in the bustle, can’t easily appreciate the urban scenery around them, and started planning images in which buildings and structures were freed from their moorings, able to float upwards, away from the anonymity of the streets to reveal the “hidden beauty” of the architecture and “stories about the individual lives, dreams, and hopes of their inhabitants.”

From a distance there is harmony

Back in Paris, Chehere decided he wanted to depict the impoverished, multicultural identity of neighbourhoods like Ménilmontant, Pigalle and Belleville. He created a set of photomontages which, in their dreamlike way, depict “the uncertainty of daily life – an alarming reality for poor communities, particularly the Gypsies and African immigrants.” He starts off with a sketch, “I draw a hotel, a circus, a caravan, an erotic cinema, then I shoot every piece of this puzzle in the same light – roof, windows, characters, chimney, antenna, every detail I need.” He then combines the elements using Photoshop.

The series is strongly influenced by his love of cinema and references such films as Hayao Miyazaki’s Howl’s Moving Castle, The Red Balloon by Albert Lamorisse and Wim Wenders’ Wings Of Desire. Like a film, each image invites the viewer into a unique world that conveys more than one meaning. “The large scale of the images allows viewers to discover two different interpretations, depending on the distance from which they are viewed,” he explains. “From afar the houses look whimsical and carefree, while up close, the details reveal a more melancholy and complex story. The Caravan, at first sight, evokes the journey, the bohemian life, the freedom. Closer, it’s Gypsies being deported.” Similarly, from a distance, his The Great Illusion appears to depict a kind of happy Noah’s Ark that’s been liberated from the city. Up close, it’s an unsafe building barely supporting a party of African immigrants who are full of hope – an illusory hope. It’s a metaphor for the dangerous odysseys immigrants must make.

Chehere’s fantastical dwellings first floated into the public eye at an exhibition in Paris’s Dock en Seine City of Fashion and Design in June 2012, winning the Special Award of the Biennale des Créateurs d’images. Since then the series has appeared in galleries and shows around the world, and this spring five new airborne creations were displayed at the Muriel Guepin Gallery in New York. The new images differ from the first series in that “they are more rich in detail. These ones you can almost walk around in the image,” Chehere jests. There are certainly more signs of the inhabitants, both human and non-human, in this set and the pictures are rich with stories.

“[In Red] I mixed together references to the 1932 horror movie Murders In The Rue Morgue, adapted from a story by Edgar Allen Poe (there’s a portrait of him on the third floor) and the sad but true story of Zizi Bamboula.” This alleged human-monkey hybrid arrived from Borneo to confuse Parisians in 1908. Billed as “an apeman arisen from a union between a negress and a gorilla”, the creature had no hair and looked like a man, but after much brouhaha it was discovered to be a chimp suffering from a bad case of eczema.

Black humour in dirty places

Despite the serious issues that run through much of his work, Chehere has a lightness of touch; often a shade of humour will soften his images. While on his travels he documented an industrial area of Romania, Copşa Mică, that has been poisoned by decades of pollution from factories. “Heavy industry was located in a few small areas to contain the pollution,” explains Chehere. “Factories were built with short smokestacks to keep emissions in the valley. Thus, over the years the environment was poisoned. In a country that already had one of the highest infant mortality rates in Europe, Copşa Mică had a life expectancy nine years below the Romanian average. Now the abandoned factory is in ruins, dismembered by Gypsies who do the dirty work – the authorities are happy to use free labour to clean up the site.”

Chehere depicts a Gypsy couple sitting in the toxic wasteland, eating their sandwiches; the scene is somehow cosy and gently amusing. “There is something that poor people have in common with rich – a sense of humour. The picture is a reflection of that moment. They were curious and simply happy to share with a stranger, even in the worst place on Earth.”

Chehere is obviously delighted to be unshackled from the ad industry but he still takes on commercials if a project interests him, either as a photographer, graphic artist or ‘conceptual consultant’. When asked what he’s working on right now, he replies enigmatically: “Lots of projects, not just photography. Art is full of possibilities…” In 2010 he directed a short film for adidas Originals out of Sid Lee. Considering his love of narrative and cinema, is he tempted to do more filmmaking? “It’s a matter of time. I like to explore all ways of expression.” It’s impossible to pin him down – try too hard and he might just float up and away on another journey of discovery.