« All men by nature desire to know. An indication of this is our esteem for the senses; for even apart from their usefulness, they are loved for themselves — and above the rest, the sense of sight.” »
Laurie Di Francesco is an artist-author working primarily through photography and writing.
She grew up between France and Italy. That double belonging brought her early on to grasp the strength and fragility of the threshold, to question what it means to belong and to be rooted: sometimes here, sometimes there, sometimes elsewhere, sometimes nowhere at all. Only the sky — blue on either side — never changes.
A displacement that reaches even into the language she thinks in.
The camera — disposable ones first, then a point-and-shoot given to her as a child — became, early on, the tool to document and share her life on either side of the border.
Her photographic projects carry a certain power of softness and candor, as a counterpoint to the difficulty of inhabiting not one but several places at once — and to the work of resignifying the wounds of the past that everyone carries.
As a young adult, she settles in Brazil — a country that becomes a homeland of the heart and a wellspring for her artistic practice. It is in Rio de Janeiro, at twenty, that she takes her first photography classes, at Ateliê da Imagem.
More recently, she sharpens her technique at the ENSP in Arles, and her ability to translate stories into images, alongside figures such as Fabienne Pavia, Antoine d'Agata, and Klavdij Sluban.
Her influences include Claudia Andujar, Graciela Iturbide, Luigi Ghirri, Jacques-Henri Lartigue, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Miguel Rio Branco, José Diniz, and Letizia Battaglia, among others.
A philosophy graduate, she approaches art through an existentialist lens. Nietzsche helps her think through perspectivism — not as relativism, but as a demand to multiply points of view; Ricœur, otherness and freedom; Bachelard, the gratuitous beauty of form.
All ways of thinking through what she already practices with a camera: transfiguring the real without idealizing it, in its brightness as much as in its fragility.
She exhibited for the first time in Belo Horizonte in 2024, with a project built from archival images titled Spilling Beyond the Lines.
Her thinking and her work today center on several ongoing projects: the question of the threshold continues in Quando sono qui, non sono là; it widens into the body's relationship to water in the continuation of* En corps à la mer*; and, in* Is this love that I'm feeling?, she questions love as a possible place to give birth to oneself again.