The Holodeck / Arles

A series of photographs of five mature women, against a vast green landscape obscured by clouds and mist.

The title “Holodeck” is a sci-fi term that refers to a facility on starships where holographic images are used to create realistic simulations of other places.

A common motif to these photographs comes from the opening lines to a poem in Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal (Flowers of Evil):

I have not forgotten our little white retreat
Where we were neighbors to the town of busy streets;
Our plaster Venus and Pomona barely could
Conceal their nakedness within our meagre wood.
Evenings, the sun would stream superbly, and would splash
Prismatic colors through the simple window glass;
He seemed a curious eye in overarching space
Who watched us as we dined in silence, without haste,
And spread throughout the room a mellow candle-glow
On frugal drapes of serge, the tablecloth below.

Charles Baudelaire, “Flowers of Evil”, XCIX, 1857.

The indistinct landscape, seemingly uprooted in time and space, is a fitting device that transports the subjects to a dreamt place. An ideal remembered place that is always unreal.