Frank Lebon photographs the blood that binds us

Between 2020 and 2023, photographer Frank Lebon asked his friends and family to donate their blood – just a drop – which he then smeared on microscope slides and photographed. It was an intimate act at an unusual time, when the shock and awe of the Covid pandemic forced a new awareness of health and human connection. Lebon was attempting to navigate this strange new world, and seeking out a new way to capture the blood that binds us all.

The result is One Blood, Lebon’s first solo photobook. Lebon’s lens moves from the micro to the macro: capturing blood cells with unusual clarity, alongside portraits of his loved ones and landscapes that speak to him. His instinct for experimentation led him to produce photo collages that explore the symbolism of blood, as well as portraits in which his subjects are illuminated by red light – their own blood – projected onto their faces by Lebon’s flash gun being fired through their hands.

Lebon’s images are paired with an essay by his friend, artist and curator Laura Serejo Genes, which puts Lebon’s life alongside that of Jacques André Boiffard, a Surrealist photographer and medical radiographer. Genes’ essay brings to light Lebon and Boiffard’s parallel interests in imaging bodies.

We spoke to Lebon and Genes about how this book came together.

Frank, you worked on this project during the pandemic, a time when health, bodily fluids and close contact were on all of our minds. How did this affect your work and the approach to this book?

Frank Lebon: Although it wasn’t the spark that ignited the idea, the Covid-19 pandemic definitely fueled the creative fire. It turned a project that I was simply contemplating into one that I felt had relevance. It was serendipitous. It turned the project into something to share with the world. I always turn to the quote that Laura included in her essay:

“I am concerned, I say, with facts which may belong to the order of pure observation, but which on each occasion present all the appearances of a signal, without our being able to say precisely which signal, and of what; facts which when I am alone permit me to enjoy unlikely complicities, which convince me of my error in occasionally presuming I stand at the helm alone.” – André Breton, Nadja

The project required you to meet and work with a great variety of people — friends, relations and others. Do you think people are made through their blood or their environment?

FL: When I was working on the project, one idea that felt very relevant was that, under the surface, the red that runs through us all looks the same. What I find interesting looking at the work now that it’s finished is that, yes, blood is objectively identical, but when it comes to photographing it my subjectivity finds a crop, a scale or a difference that I become attracted to. The images end up looking wildly different, and reality is in direct contradiction with objectivity. It becomes clear that there isn’t any difference in the blood itself, the differences are only projected on the subject by the viewer.

Throughout the book, blood symbolises various things: injury, medicine, biography, protest — what does blood mean to you?

FL: In the context of this book, blood became a means to connect to people and the world around me. Maybe a good way to describe it is that the blood was a filter; a filter to shine light through, looking at my life and the past few years through this filter.

Laura, how did you get involved with the project? And what did you make of Frank’s unusual request to take and photograph people’s blood?

Laura Serejo Genes: When Frank first approached me with this project, I had already witnessed him drawing his friend’s blood in a casual party setting, but I didn’t know for what purpose. I knew Frank had some habits of collecting, like collecting brooms and other sanitation tools from the street, but this one struck me as different, more… intense. It changed the way I thought of collecting blood because it requires a give-and-take. And in that realisation, it reminded me of the give-and-take of portraiture – someone sitting for their photograph to be ‘taken’ and the photographer ‘shooting’ them. Frank had already processed these ideas subliminally, and he began pursuing the project with this fervour of being onto something.

So, my role began as a dialogic one: hearing Frank talk about this collection drive and his ambitions around making it a photographic project and also a book. I responded in relation to the special thing Frank had put his finger on, blood as this coloured medium that runs through us all but only reveals itself in very specific moments. Watching Frank prick the fingers of friends, and chase blood bikes in London, he was physically moving around making these connections on both a social and urban level.

The essay is almost two biographies at once, switching between modern day and the past, fact and fiction. How was this idea conceived and how did you find stitching this double-sided story together?

LSG: Frank’s work has a unique essence that makes it a real treat to experience in more commercial settings, like his work for fashion or the music industry. The book felt like an opportunity to investigate the historical references hidden in his style.

In a world where the scientific and technical feel more accessible than ever, I loved that Frank was making his own images of blood, not scientific ‘lab work’ but artist ‘studio work.’ This jives so well with what the Surrealists did; using the scientific tool of the camera to reframe everyday things in a manner that exposes the magic in the mundane. And that inspired me – artistic licences I could take as a writer.

Jacques André Boiffard, while not a household name, took some of the most famous Surrealist photographs. He already held a place in Frank’s heart for his works like, Big Toe (1929). And once we learned that his work for the Surrealists was actually done during a break from his medical studies, we knew there was more to explore there.

However, there is limited information about Jacques André Boiffard (or JAB, as we like to call him). The essay is structured around essential dates in the lives of Frank and JAB. The dates act as pillars, seminal moments in the lives of these two men, and from that structure, I could write, weaving their stories together in the essay despite them never crossing in time.

How did getting to know Boiffard’s work change how you see Frank’s?

LSG: There are very few writings about JAB in English, but one of these is an essay by Jodi Hauptman and Stephanie O’Rourke titled, Surrealist Fact. The essay is from a larger book, Object:Photo, which is perfectly titled and shifts the conversation of photographs to the singular object of the photographic print rather than the subject and photographer. This thinking was super useful when I began looking at the large prints Frank was making of his microscopic blood images and also all of the treatments the photographs received after being printed: weaving celluloid tape over the whole surface and painting over the area outside the microscope’s view with matte black paint. And there are touches of blood in the framing of these works as well (shoutout to Peter Eason Daniels) the blood becoming a photograph and then becoming an object.

I love reading Frank’s work as a cosmic continuation of something the Surrealists were onto. Frank’s work reads so contemporary, yet there are (subliminal) art historical threads. And they’ve been so fun to unearth with Frank; there’s a psychoanalytic aspect to this reflection. For example, the fact that Frank didn’t even remember seeing the JAB exhibition at the Pompidou when he was a young teen, and yet it can be argued that on some deeper level, he never forgot it.

Read an extract from Genes’ essay:

2020

Lebon is hospitalized. He needs to relearn how to live, with the assistance of insulin, with the practice of drawing blood, with the support of the institution of medicine. Carmen, his lover, his partner, his friend, dresses as a nurse to cross Covid lines and brings him flowers, brings him life. She’s her own flash, always shining her rose-glow on the world. She lays her petite body on his, forming intimacy in a sterile place. When she unglues her hot skin from his, the red circles he’s drawn on himself transfer themselves on to her tan skin. A venn diagram of their love, a sign of what’s to come.

1940

Boiffard can’t help but continue to create images. He completes his medical studies, specializing in radiology. He has a new studio but the same subjects. What could be more surreal than the reality of the human body? True nudes! He’s seeing sides of people they cannot fathom. He finds beauty in the microscopic.

2021

There’s a new-normal, for the world and for Lebon’s body. His relationship to his own blood, to the blood of others, deepens. He sees it everywhere. He draws it from his family, from his friends. He collects their squares, their slides, shines light through them. He gets excited just imagining what they’ll look like under a microscope.

1951

A professional photographer once again! Boiffard contributes images of blood for publication as part of scientific studies. New instruments, new lenses, new platforms, new audience: The images excite him just as much. How funky they are, how they upend all expectations. The imagery ignites in him a drive he remembers from running around Paris to capture the street scenes for Breton’s Nadja. How we need to lose ourselves in thought to find ourselves alive.

2022

Lebon has always concerned himself with the street. He photographs street-cleaners, collecting brooms and other remnants from overlooked services. It is evidence of a shared civility; under-recognized and methodical. In his wandering, his bike rides, his walks, he becomes aware of another system of redistribution. Not of litter or of leaves but of blood. Blood bikes. Blood is the authority that allows them to speed around the traffic to deliver life. How do they feel, the blood bikers, are their emotions rushing like the blood in their veins as they zip through the winding streets?