After finishing her study Art History at the University of Amsterdam, Louise Honée (1974) discovered her passion for photography. She decided to continue her studies at the Photo Academy of Amsterdam and specialized in documentary photography. Since then, Honée has been working as a portrait and documentary photographer.
The central subject in her photography is the indestructible hope of the youth, capturing this fragile hope in all kinds of circumstances. Always on the look out for the poetry in a story, Honée gathers the images she creates together, in the form of a visual novella, wherein the people she meets have a role in their own context. Her work is about how identities are expressed through the concept of the environment and landscape.
With different kind of scenes, landscape, nature, animals and people, she concentrates on the narrative of her story, expressing the concepts of identity, nature, desire, belonging, memory and history. The work We Love Where We Live has become one of het major projects, which has taken place over a periode from spring 2017 to autumn 2019 in McDowell County in West Virginia, V.S. Honée’s work has been awarded for the Prix HSBC pour la Photographie (2020) and nominated for various international photo awards such as Capture Your Freedom Photo Competition (New York) Palm Studios Photo Prize (London), Les Boutographies (Montpellier) and Foto Festival Naarden ( Netherlands).
About ‘We Love Where We Live‘ – words by Louise Honée:
McDowell County in West Virginia is partly located in the wooded mountains of the Appalachians, once one of the richest areas in America due to coal mining. For decades one after the other mine was closed down, jobs disappeared and many people have left, leaving behind their homes. Throughout time more and more ghost towns arose with abandoned school buildings and stores, empty sport fields and rusty play equipment. Those who remained, hope the tide will turn.
What future prospects are still offered to the young people growing up in this area. The youth adapts to their situation, strolling around with no clear destination, she is also proud. She cannot leave or does not want to leave at all. Some, they don’t know better.
Indeed, the Appalachian mountains function as a closing border but at the same time act as a natural protection wall. Young people enjoy the strong solidarity that characterizes the community. It offers warmth and safety.
Somewhere along the road is a sign with the inscription We Love Where We Live. Fascinated by that apparent contradiction, the evident problems in the area and the intense solidarity of the people, the transience, Louise Honée searched for the profound sense of individuality of young people, who are strongly connected to each other by the same environment where they grow up. In her narrative the encounters of the children of this breathtaking area gradually flow into the images of the spaces they inhabit.
Honée is interested in telling an image story about the identity children growing up in the rural and industrial area of the Appalachian mountains. In her work she observes the nature in combination with a more direct approach to picture her portraits, but also here she follows her instinct to observe the movements and gazes of her subjects. Honée tries to connect with the anonymus individuals who become more and more familiar with her when the ice breaks. By winning their trust she is allowed to photograph them. The direction of her narrative is shaped by the new things she discovered in every journey and by the different encounters she had.
All the pictures form this series are made in McDowell County, West Virginia, in the United States. They came into being over a period from spring 2017 to autumn 2019. Surprised by the warmth and openness of the people over the time strangers became friends, that gave her confidence to keep going back to this special place.
