Marie Passa de Safar graduated in architecture and design and worked as an architect for many years. In 2007, she turned her attention to photography. She currently lives and works in Paris.
Semblances Lyriques refers to the artist’s interpretation of the world around her, a ‘lyrical‘ rather than ‘objective’ viewpoint. Passa de Safar describes how chance and spontaneity played a crucial role in determining her subject matter: random encounters that took place as she photographed buildings for her architectural practice became more interesting than capturing the buildings themselves. “I want to try to show, and share with those who look at my pictures, a little of the emotion that is mine when I photograph a subject. I want to get away from ‘fixed semblances,’” she says.
Her experiments with different themes – architecture, nature, nudes – lie somewhere between photography, drawing, painting and installation. The final creative act takes place in her ‘contemporary darkroom,’ where she ‘fine-tunes‘ the work using photo-editing software, “like painting without a palette or brushes.”