This time, it wasn't me who walked into somewhere. It was someone who came to me.
Albane! Ah, Albane.
I met her at a dinner, at my sister-in-law's. She tells me, "I'm a singer." Me, "I'm a photographer." The simplest stories begin like that.
It's 2013. Albane, at that moment, is a rough diamond just beginning to shine. La Monnaie has just given her a fine role in a world premiere: La Dispute, by Benoît Mernier. The press is starting to write her name. She is young, she is very beautiful, and there is already that poise, the kind that belongs to people who will go far. She sparkles and at the same time stays mysterious. Utterly approachable, yet she keeps people at a distance without meaning to. Charisma. An actress, already. And that rare thing learned nowhere: a presence that fills the room without doing a thing.
During the dinner I tell her: come by the house, I'll make your portrait. It would be a pleasure, you'll be able to use it for the press. Three days later she turns up at my place. We drink coffee. We talk a lot. And then we take a few pictures. Quite quickly I sense I'm holding something, the DNA of who she is at that moment. It's so much simpler this way. No agent, no make-up artist, no stylist. Her, the light and me.
I love this picture for its simplicity. Albane is not yet the woman who will sing Carmen in China with the musicians of the Opéra de Paris. Not yet the one to whom Le Monde will devote a full page. Not yet France Musique's "chameleon voice." But she is on her way, and you can feel it. The image needs no staging. It tells what it has to tell: Albane, at that precise moment.
I crossed paths with her a few more times. And then nothing. Me on my island in the Indian Ocean, her in her life and her tours. But every now and then, a little message arrives on my phone. That too is photography. It was, and yet it remains. Beautiful encounters never really fade.
Julien Claessens
