Combat (from the series Haven Her Body Was)

French photographer Noémie Goudal graduated from the Royal College of Art, London, in 2010, and was included in the Saatchi Gallery’s exhibition Out of Focus: Photography in 2012. Her works play with the boundary between real and constructed images, inviting the viewer to re-evaluate their understanding of the world. Combat belongs to the series Haven Her Body Was, which seeks to explore humanity’s relationship with secluded, isolated spaces, invoking Michel Foucault’s notion of ‘non-lieux’. Shot on location, using analogue techniques, many of the images in the series are deliberately staged by the artist, installed as prints and re-photographed in different geographic settings. Combat, by contrast, captures a real place: ‘I found it in France in Normandy on the beach’, she explains. ‘It’s a bunker from World War II. The bunkers were supposed to be destroyed, but it was so expensive that they just left them there. It’s funny, because many people thought that this building was fake, especially since many of my photos contain paper backdrops’. This indeterminacy speaks directly to the heart of Goudal’s practice: ‘If you show such an image next to another one that is constructed, the viewer will still look for the construction where there isn’t one’, she asserts. ‘You will start to question and maybe look better at the image.’