After Laura Stevens went through a break up, she visualised her emotions in a series of painterly portraits.
�There was this weight and urgency of needing to express what was happening,� says 37-year-old photographer Laura Stevens, recalling the familiar feelings of pain and confusion following the end of significant relationship two years ago, which inspired her series of portraits, titled Another November.
�I was paralysed with feelings of loss, and it was as if this project was my escape route, a way to navigate me back to myself,� she says.
�The series is a visual narrative on life after the end of a relationship, exploring how one copes with heartbreak and the loss of love.�
Rather than placing herself in the images, Stevens chose to cast other women � friends and occasionally people she�d met � and directed them to �portray the gradual emotional and circumstantial stages along the well-trodden track of the broken-hearted�.
She decided straightaway that she would only photograph women of a similar age to her who were living in Paris, her home city, �to create obvious parallels�; women who could ultimately be seen as just one woman, she says.
�With this being such a personal and melancholy subject, I felt it could be shared more easily by using multiple identities, dispersed gestures and making the images to have a more palatable visual form than the reality,� she says. �I approached women in the street when I perceived a sensibility in them that could work for the series.�
Inspired by what she calls the language of painting, English-born Stevens worked on the series over a period of six months. During this time, she photographed her subjects mainly in their apartments, drawing on the domesticity of these settings, which becomes a key component in the images.
The scenes are familiar � a woman holds a cigarette and stares out of a window, while another sits hopelessly at a table, a vacant expression on her face. But there is a quiet and slightly sinister melodrama to the images, which the photographer accentuates through the use of artificial lighting. This, she says, also helps to create a psychological tension within the photographs.
�I staged scenes using these women to enact the slow steps of adjustment towards acceptance and a renewed personal identity as a single person,� she says.
�It is a project about nostalgia and the passage of time; time acquires a different meaning and pace when one experiences loss� Each day you fight to acquire different habits for a new self.�
See more of Laura�s work here.
Started out doing photography at the age of 6 using an uncle's old 1940 kodak brownie box camera. At 15 years of age, I decided to buy my very own 1975 Praktica SLR camera. I now shoot with a Nikon D850. I do unpaid TFP and commercial paid work.