KARINE LAVAL
t h ea tr ica lity o f pla ce
MARC PITZKE: How did you get started in photography?
KARINE LAVAL: I was already fascinated with photography as a child. My grandparents lived in a vil-
lage near Paris that had the first Museum of Photography. It had this huge collection of old cameras.
My grandparents would take me there. That was my first encounter with the photographic object.
MARC: A kid in the proverbial candy story, except your candy was photography.
KARINE: The old cameras, the Daguerreotypes, these pictures of people from another time, they nour-
ished my imagination. Those objects—that mysterious equipment and the process of how you get to
a photograph from a simple box—all that was a magical thing to me. My grandfather had a very old
camera, and he gave it to me when he saw my curiosity for photography. It was a Kodak Retina; I still
have it. It was one of the first portable small cameras from the forties.
MARC: When you first started out, what did you originally photograph?
KARINE: The first pictures I took with that camera were pictures of surveillance. I was snooping on my
grandparents' neighbors. I was a big climber, so I would climb on the roof of their building when I was
young. From there I would look over at the neighbors and take pictures.
MARC: So, you were a spy?
KARINE: Yes. Then when I was about 15 or 16, I bought my first camera with my own money. It was a Mi-
nolta. I took it on trips. I was already traveling quite a bit because my dad was living in the Caribbean then.
Portrait by Darren Anthony.
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