Certain smells evoke mental images, memories of moments in one’s past. This very intimate quality of smell also applies to perfume, and it is just this representation of the olfactory to which Christelle Boulé of the University of Quebec in Montreal (UQAM) and The University of Art and Design in Lausanne (ÉCAL) has dedicated herself in the series Drops (2016). The young photographer has identified a creative field at the crossroads between the world of fashion and experimentation in the medium of photography. Based on the range of emotions evoked by the smell of perfume, Drops presents us with a fascinating, ‘honest’ visualisation of the imaginary.

Inspired by olfactory memories from her childhood, the series Opium (2015) introduced the themes presented in Drops. Made up of diptychs, the pictures in the series depicted home life and sections of bodies or faces, illustrating memories of the artist’s mother who wore this perfume, as well as memories of her brother as an adolescent. The concept had already been born.

The series Parfums: 1889-2015, made up of black and white photograms, marks the start of the representation of perfumed fluids that is continued in Drops. Several drops of perfume are transferred onto photographic paper, creating a photogram; capturing the imprint of light resulting from the chemical reaction of molecules of perfume on the photographic paper. Returning to a technique dear to pioneers of the 1920s, Boulé has created Drops in the context of a photographic production in which analogue photography becomes a subject in its own right. Particularly interested in the pre-digital era, the photographer has devoted herself to a field of experiment that was completely abandoned with the emergence and development of digital technology.

In a field characterised by muses and a highly-coded iconography, Boulé decided to move towards abstraction in order to leave room for the imagination of the individual viewer; a viewer who loses himself dreaming of the connections between the coloured shapes and the smells of the perfumes in the photographs.

The vocabulary that enables us to characterise what we see and what we feel comes together through some of the images in the Drops collection: bitter, Baroque, copper, ethereal, cloudy, sparkling, potent, brooding, soft, hazy, velvet, voluptuous. There are so many words to describe what is evoked when viewing Boulé’s photograms, each creating a pathway between the olfactory, matter and emotion. If the emotion evoked by a perfume is immaterial it can, nonetheless, travel along chromatic scales. The photographer has decided to use colour to maintain the link with the original bottles and packaging, recovering the world evoked by the original components of each perfume. For example, Amazinggreen by Comme des Garçons contains hints of green pepper and ivy, corresponding to its dark green bottle.

The photograms are small, and the exhibits are not glazed because the photographer wants the viewer to approach the prints as if to smell the neck of someone wearing perfume. The intimate dimension is again present, and is completed by the unique character of each print. Close to the image, the viewer loses himself in the colourful abstraction; carried away by the lingering smell of the perfume.