Bienvenue Dans Les Limbes is an autobiographical account of creative block; the liminal space between projects whereby Louis Stopforth has accumulated a selection of photographs taken in a period of artistic stasis. Underpinned by his connection and disconnection to those closest to him, and bookmarked in time by his own brief career as a painter and decorator as well as his sisters pregnancy, this is a book that hovers amongst times of transition. Louis Stopforth offers viewers a quasi-fictional experience whereby his vernacular intersects between introspective documentation to an embodied narrative. With a written practice reviewing art and photography, it is here that we find a purely image-based experience, a rarity in his work, however their remains subtle references to literature and academia embedded within. Whether this be the clear documentation of texts such as Philip Gustons ‘I Paint What I Want To See’, or with inspiration gleaned from texts such as Italo Calvino’s ‘Invisible Cities’ and ‘The Adventure of A Photographer’, Samuel Beckett’s ‘The Lost Ones’, Georges Perec’s ‘Species of Spaces’, and others. Similarly, with a conceptual practice that often interrogates the materiality of the photographic medium there can be found a photographic self-awareness, demonstrating how photography is a medium of fragmentary vision and one that describes rather than records.
