Anima Rolland

Born on May 17, 1989 in Paris, Anima Rolland is a graphic designer by profession, and has been passionate about film photography for many years.

After her first exhibition of about ten photos at La Station Gare des Mines, an outdoor art scene at Porte d’Aubervilliers, the young photographer finally focused on an artistic line that is close to her heart and that she named Loin des regards.

Shooting on the fly is undoubtedly what characterises her work. Mostly portraits, children, old people, vulnerable, touching, left out… She wants to show those who are not looked at in a sanitized and intolerant world. A world that is afraid to be confronted with the reality of the “outside”.

Anima photographs those we don’t want to see, those who don’t fit the norms and who are avoided. Those who arouse embarrassment, anguish and sometimes even disgust. She recounts their lives through three main themes that feed her story and allow her to shed light on those who are plunged into the dark. Her approach to her subjects is not the most common. She photographs in an unpredictable way, does not frame, does not wait for her subject to pose or give me the right to take her picture.

She wants to materialize the intimacy of a person, on the fly, to capture it. It is the only way to freeze the real, the authenticity in a movement that betrays the deep self without artifice, far from the selfies symptomatic of our time.

This is also why she focuses solely on these people, these places, these human conditions. These are the subjects who seem to her to be the purest and most honest, and who can be photographed more easily, without being obsessed by the competition, by the image they project.

Her objects of creation are the most fragile people in society. She takes wisdom, the last years when the most beautiful ones are behind, memories, the wise, vaporous, troubled and at the same time story-filled look, the wrinkled face. No more appearances, no more possible tricks to hide age. But also childhood, where everything begins, the ego does not yet exist, innocence, and above all wonder. The purity of the look on a world that is not moralized, that is not judged.

She will also show those who are “out of the ordinary”, left behind by a sanitized contemporary society. She pays tribute to those who remain in the shadows of a society where appearances have become essential: the undocumented who work in inhuman conditions for a pittance, the poor who are losing their minds, the disabled who are barely taken into account.

She also sometimes captures dilapidated places, under construction, rubbish, witnesses of a mass consumerism that degrades the environment, that pollutes, that rots… For her, disgust is on the wrong side. It is in these real, humble people who fight every day to survive that I find beauty.