
LIKE DREAMERS DO
Coralie
I love listening to stories. All my life I’ve been asking to my grandparents, parents and anyone around me to tell me their stories. Their childhood, their love stories, their travels, their feelings about their life, anything that could make me picture who they really are inside. Stories are incredible, they allow you to travel, dream and feel.
My family has always been an important part of me. I was lucky to have my mum taking photos and my dad taking videos of me and my brother since we were born. Their own parents did the same so we always had a huge collection albums. My favourite thing when I was younger was to spend days looking at the photos, asking who was on the photos and listening to my mum telling me stories about them.
When I started studying photography, I discovered that my grandma had an amazing collection of photos from when she was engaged in the army during the Vietnam war. Someone (that she didn’t remember the name) photographed her and one of my uncle with a 6×6 analog camera and the quality of them were incredible. I then decided to do a project with her trying to photograph her in the same posture she was when she was 24 years old (my age at the moment) and to record her talking about how she felt at this age.
On the other side, my grandparents had a house on a field in the middle of nowhere with no electricity, no running water, and the toilet outside. It was amazing – I could go there by bike from my parent’s house, spend my day surrounded by nature, chasing frogs in the pond, and cooking imaginary food with mud. This is probably when I developed a big imagination and I’m so grateful for the simple life I had surrounded by my favourite people.