Avant d'oublier, long exposure portraits by Max Barrett

Blurred portrait of a woman in a bright pink jumper on a woodland path
Avant d'oublier (2024–2025)
Blurred portrait of a woman in a bright pink jumper on a woodland path
Long exposure portrait of a blonde woman, hair carried away by movement
Blurred portrait of an elderly man with a white beard against a dark background
Man in a black jacket among birch trees, face erased by movement
Man with glasses by a country fence, face rendered in multiple exposure
Blurred portrait of an elderly woman in a pale blue shawl in a bright room
Person in a red checked shirt against a brick wall, face held in suspension
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The face is the form we recognise most instinctively. In these images that recognition is suspended, not to disappear, but to reveal what remains when certainty fades.

The blur is neither an accident nor an effect. It is a position.

The face as a remnant

Avant d'oublier (Before Forgetting) brings together portraits made in long exposure between 2024 and 2025. The face is present and out of reach at once: you recognise a posture, a colour, an age, but never quite a person. What remains comes down to very little, the line of a shoulder, the shadow of a pair of glasses, a pink jumper in the woods.

The series begins with a simple refusal: not to settle the face into a definitive image. A sharp portrait fixes a person in one instant and claims to contain them. Here the length of the exposure leaves the sitter room to move, and therefore to resist.

How the images are made

Everything happens at the moment of shooting, on a Hasselblad 907X. No image is blurred afterwards. The exposure runs long enough for the sitter's movement, or the camera's, to register in the same frame. Some portraits layer several exposures, which brings out those thin lines that cross the face like a drawing left on the surface.

The work is done in natural light, most often outdoors, sometimes in an ordinary room. Nothing is staged: the people photographed pose normally, and time displaces the rest.

Prints and acquisition

Each image exists as a single unique print on hemp paper made by hand by Jean-Pierre Gouy, a master papermaker in Corrèze, France. Hemp fibre has an irregular grain that absorbs ink without smoothing it: the print keeps a material quality of its own, which carries the subject of the series further. Print size 25 × 32 cm.

High-resolution digital files are also available, with worldwide shipping.

Max Barrett© 2026