Isabelle Seilern

The world reflects itself

Certainly, Isabelle Seilern has an eye for the visual, the subtle, the fined, and the delicate. But that’s among other things. Certainly, she also has an eye for music since regardless of her subjects – light on water or tiles, puddles that tremble with a footstep, viewers choosing their place at a show, or elsewhere, a regatta’s sculls, etc. – she captures and gives rhythm to what is happening, who is passing by, and grabs our attention along the way. And how does this grab us? By the music of the reflection, by the waves given off by everyone and everything.

In all things, and once again (because I would like to say what is so obvious with this photographer) Isabelle Seilern has the poetry for the apparently banal, showing that there is the extraordinary in the ordinary should one pay attention. How does she get our attention? Precisely through the reflection, which creates a lateral vision that illuminates, that reveals what is present. Display windows, sidewalks, streets to follow, faded asphalt, unpolished glass, neon lights in the rain – as many different things for the lens to focus on, for a shot that crystalizes, condenses and liquefies.

Then, the artist identifies and works on her perspective such that “the” reality is as the eye sees it. The eye in the physical and psychological sense, inseparably embedded, which make up what we call a “view”, a “manner of seeing”, as a camera filters what’s going on in the brain, from the sensitive cornea on through the retina where it imprints on the back of the brain.

And finally, Isabelle Seilern’s vision, all reflections, shows that the world itself is a reflection of the world. Of this world obviously, where so much remains to be seen.

Jean-Philippe Domecq

Isabelle Seilern exhibits regularly in Europe.