Desiree Dolron (1963)
For Desiree Dolron, photographs are like studies: 'It's just like in painting,' she says. 'You have to first make a sketch before you start painting with oils. In my work, the photos are the sketches.'* Dolron photographs with film but processes the images on computer, searching for the perfect image, sometimes for months, until everything comes together. An important theme in her oeuvre is that of inner world versus external world. Whether it's her documentary photos taken abroad, or an autonomous series of fairy-tale photos taken in her studio, all her images have a timeless quality.
The subjects she has recorded on film include rituals from a wide range of religious festivals all over the world and portraits of Cuba in the final years of Fidel Castro. Her filmic series, Xteriors, seems to be a slowly developing image story in which an array of figures play a role. Red-haired women, a mysterious little girl and a sleeping boy are portraited in deep blues, blacks and greens. Dolron's images are characterised by long shutter times, and evoke the atmosphere of paintings of the Flemish Primitive masters such as Petrus Christus or Rogier van der Wyden.
* H. de Klerck, ‘De computer als donkere kamer’, De Volkskrant, 24.02.2005
