The space is like frozen in time. On the walls, a pale pink earthenware that can still be found in some bathrooms spared by the renovation. On the floor, a tricolor tiling that smells good of the 1990s. And on the exterior facade, eleven letters are displayed roughly in a typeface typical of these places: LAVOMATIC. It is in this strange laundry-scented space that Tanguy Carrée has spent a good part of his nights this week. Passionate about photography, this 24-year-old from Rennes is currently leading a series called washing lights which takes shape inside the laundries of Rennes. A very student city, the Breton capital offered him a good package of lairs of washing machines to explore. He chose eight in which he dragged his friends from the cinema to “invent lots of stories”.
This strange decor idea came to him before the summer and brought back some memories of high school. “I was at Jeanne-d’Arc and we often went to buy snacks with our friends. When it rained, we went to the laundromat next door. It’s a special place, which everyone knows or has used at some point. A place that mixes generations. Laundromats are so rich. With all the machines lined up, it has a look,” slips the young photographer. He also remembers Thursday evenings when people met to play music on the back of big square machines.
Since Tuesday, he has been spending a good part of his nights there, with the agreement of the owners, to carry out what he describes as the biggest project of his young career as a photographer. Living in the evening, Tanguy Carrée had already got used to it when he was a night watchman for taxes, on the sidelines of the cinema studies he was following during the day at ESRA. An intense rhythm of life that had forced him to give up the career of kayaker in which he had been surrounded since his childhood. For a few years, he has swapped paddles for the camera or the camera, chaining small personal projectsall linked by the image.
A foam machine in Sainte-Anne
For this new series, he armed himself with lights and very colorful outfits, having fun diverting the decor of washing machines to recreate somewhat kitsch universes. Here, a weightlifter appears to be disco dancing. There, a woman succumbs to an overdose of detergent. A little further on, two elders sit in old armchairs facing a cathode-ray television. In Sainte-Anne, where he was Thursday evening, the young photographer even brought a foam machine in the middle of the metal drums. “We want to recreate an imaginary world in a universe that everyone knows”, explains the Rennais, who likes to play with the border between the real and the unreal.
The night shoots will end on Tuesday evening before giving way to retouching and special effects work that the photographer will carry out with his friends. Clichés that he should exhibit in January in Rennes, but that he would then like to travel. And why not decorate the decrepit walls of laundries?