Léon Émile Loizeau

You describe failure as a creative principle. When did technical imperfection first become central to your photographic language?

This was not a decision I made at a specific point in time. Rather, it emerged gradually through different periods of experimentation, sometimes through accidental discoveries and sometimes through techniques I consciously developed.

I first encountered this idea in 2009, while taking self-portraits with a webcam. The webcam was malfunctioning, and I noticed that the image would occasionally become distorted. Instead of seeing this as a technical problem, I became interested in the visual possibilities of the distortion. Later, I began experimenting deliberately with the bottoms of glasses, crystal, plastic bags, transparent packaging, and different kinds of glass and plastic that could refract light, interrupt the image, or transform what was in front of the lens.

I also explored other forms of technological failure: a cracked LED television screen that produced unexpectedly abstract images, applications that generated distorted or fragmented visuals, and image disruptions caused by weak internet connections. These accidental forms of failure gradually became part of my photographic vocabulary.

For me, photography does not have to reproduce the outside world exactly as it appears. I am interested in what happens when the image itself becomes unstable and begins to transform without relying on Photoshop or similar digital manipulation. By allowing photography and painting to move into each other, I try to create images that become painterly, abstract, fragmented, or ambiguous.

The aim is therefore not necessarily to create something perfect or conventionally beautiful, but to discover something unexpected and visually compelling within imperfection, distortion, and chance.

You work with broken cameras, pinhole cameras, shattered glass, nylon, and low-quality filters. How do you decide which material or intervention best expresses the idea behind a particular image?

I determine this through experimentation. I try different materials and interventions and observe how each one transforms the image. I can often understand the results more clearly when I see them on a computer screen, where subtle distortions and unexpected effects become more apparent.

I then select the photographs according to whether the intervention transforms the image in a way that feels meaningful, painterly, abstract, ambiguous, or visually intriguing to me. It is not so much a predetermined choice as a process of discovery. I experiment, observe, and allow the image itself to reveal which material or intervention works best.

How much of the final result is carefully planned, and how much emerges through accident, improvisation, and the unpredictable behaviour of your equipment?

I usually begin with a certain idea in mind. I construct the image mentally and try to visualize it before taking the photograph—in a sense, I make the photograph in my head first. But I never remain completely fixed on that initial idea.

Once I begin working, I allow the process to become experimental. I use different objects and interventions, observe the results on a computer screen, and select the images that speak to me. I cannot assign a precise percentage to what is planned and what is accidental, because I am completely open to unpredictability and chance.

I also think it is almost impossible for an image to be one hundred percent planned. Even in traditional film photography, there is room for uncertainty: the developing of the film and the process of printing can produce results that were not entirely anticipated.

For me, experimentation means working with possibilities rather than trying to control every outcome. I begin with an intention, but remain open to what happens in the moment—to changes, unexpected effects, and accidental discoveries. Often, it is precisely the dialogue between what I imagine and what I could not have predicted that shapes the final image.

In Dimension Changed Time, Escape from Time, and Twisted Time, you physically distort the hands of a clock. What does the clock represent in this series, and why was it important to alter the object itself?

There are actually several other variations in this series, some of which I have already conceived but have not yet photographed: 4x XYZ, Pruned Time, Vanished Time — Time That Has Vanished and Disappeared, 2x Repaired Time, Fragmented Time, Time in Chains, Time Fought, and 2x No Name.

The clock represents time, while its hands make visible its continuous flow and irreversible movement forward. By physically bending, distorting, or even breaking the hands of the clock, I try to intervene in this familiar representation of time.

Yet no matter how radically I alter the object, I cannot actually slow time down, make it move backwards, or bring it even slightly closer to a previous moment. Time cannot be stopped, repaired, or destroyed.

This tension between physically altering the object and being unable to alter what it represents is central to the series. The distortion of the clock becomes a kind of futile intervention: I can manipulate the object and the image, but I cannot manipulate time itself. The physical transformation therefore turns an ordinary object into a space for thinking about the irreversibility and persistence of time.

The clocks remain recognizable even as their ability to measure time becomes unreliable. Are these works concerned with psychological time, memory, mortality, or resistance to chronological order?

I would not say that these works are directly concerned with death, but rather with ageing—the experience of slowly dying while still alive, or of living as though one were already dead. Time keeps moving forward, and we have no way of stopping it. We are carried along with it, whether we want to be or not.

We continue to live in our own ways, trying to get through the present and make the most of each day, but ultimately we cannot prevent our own disappearance. Memories belong to the past, and we cannot return to them or relive the moments we once loved.

As an atheist, I do not believe in an existence beyond death. What interests me more is what happens as we grow older, when psychological and physical difficulties can appear or become more pronounced and life can become increasingly difficult.

At the same time, memories can become more vivid. Depending on where we live and the circumstances in which we find ourselves, ageing can also bring dreams of returning to another place, experiencing certain moments again, or somehow going back into the past.

In this sense, the clocks are connected to both psychological time and memory. They remain recognizable as clocks, yet their function becomes disrupted. For me, this reflects the tension between the objective passage of chronological time and our subjective experience of it—the desire to hold on to what has passed, even though time continues to carry us forward.

Born in Istanbul and now based in Geneva, you have lived between two very different cultural and visual environments. How have these cities influenced your perception of beauty, identity, and alienation?

Rather than speaking specifically about Istanbul and Geneva, I would describe this experience more broadly in terms of Turkey and Switzerland.

When I came from Turkey to Switzerland in 2004, the internet was not yet as widespread as it is today, and social media did not exist. Access to information, images, and different perspectives was much more limited. I arrived with a certain understanding of beauty shaped by my experience in Turkey.

Living in Switzerland, and more broadly in Europe, considerably expanded that understanding. I encountered a greater openness to different ways of seeing and thinking, as well as to new ideas, differences, and individual freedoms. In many ways, this experience widened my horizons and continues to influence how I perceive beauty.

In terms of identity and alienation, I have experienced a sense of not belonging both in Turkey and in Switzerland. I do not feel that I completely belong to any particular place. At the same time, Switzerland has given me a much broader space for individual and intellectual freedom, and that freedom has been important to my way of thinking and to my artistic development.

For me, belonging therefore remains an unresolved and ongoing question rather than something tied to a specific place.

Your work has been exhibited across Europe, North America, the Caribbean, and the Middle East. Have different audiences interpreted its distortion and ambiguity in noticeably different ways?

I can speak most directly about my experiences in Turkey and Switzerland. In both places, I have often found that my work is difficult for people to understand. In Turkey, it received very little attention, and if there were people who understood what I was trying to do, they were very few. I have experienced something similar in Switzerland. I have often been told quite directly, “I don’t understand anything about your art.” This has sometimes come even from photography teachers.

I think part of the difficulty is that my approach does not easily fit within conventional expectations of photography. I also do not always find it easy to describe my work using established artistic terminology. My practice has developed primarily through intuition, experimentation, and practical experience rather than through academic theory.

My experiences in photography courses made the difference particularly clear to me. The artistic and photographic approaches of many teachers and classmates were very different from mine. I often felt that people were photographing the same or similar subjects, in the same or similar places, and largely reproducing what they saw rather than transforming it through their own perspective.

What interests me is precisely the opposite: bringing something personal into the image, questioning what we recognize as a photograph, and allowing distortion, ambiguity, and experimentation to open up other ways of seeing.