Experiencing the enigmatic presence of Anne Lefebvre’s photographs never fails to make you feel taken aback. Yet they are not surprising or sensational in themselves, rather they create a feeling of “déjà vu”, in the distrurbing ease in which these unusual images resonate with the visual palettes already in our minds. Anne Lefebvre’s photos create a delightful confusion about their origins, sources and provenance, a sort of constant oscillation between potential states of mind and uncertain images. Lefebvre is a plastic artist who has fallen under the spell of the quality of the back-catalogue of historical photography that inevitably influences all phototographers. For her, making prints of her photos is not the chemical epiphany of a mental image obtained in a laboratory, but the following-up of experimental work which will put the photographic document through the trials of a painter’s studio. Her ceaseless search for new types of photographic paper and her painstaking choice of the paper to use for each print, plus her use of superimpression and erasure, her additions using an ink or felt-tip pen, her willingness to damage her prints, scalding them to make the colours run and revealing unexpected, hidden details, or to subjecting them to harsh abrasion or sprinkling with dust, as if she feels tortured by the feeling that her images lack something, infuses them with this strange, vibrating energy which appears to forbid their authentification. Her single prints with damaged, scratched and worn edges, which look as if they have sprung from a past era, speak a strange language which, nevertheless, we can understand at once. The prints look as if they have been rescued from a shipwreck, or recovered from the archive of an anonymous photographer who knew Man Ray or removed from the old family photo albums of Russian emigrants who arrived in Boulogne-Billancourt (Lefebvre’s birthplace) in the inter-war years, and who re-named it “Billankoursk”.