An Interview with Lucie March
March 26, 2026

I cannot remember the first time I saw Lucie March’s photographs, but I do know they stuck with me. The photographs–lounging bodies, a kitchen sink, hot concrete–contain both languor and tension. “It might be just another summer afternoon,” March writes, “or it might be that everyone is waiting around for the end of the world, or some other terrible thing, to unfold.”

Drawing on family history, along with film and literature, March’s work examines how photography can disrupt time, creating narratives that touch both the past and the present. “A photograph is a reminder of the sun,” March writes, referencing Joanna Zylinska’s Non-Human Photography, “[and] to work with light as a medium means contending with our beginning and our extinction.”

While our conversation here focuses on photography, March works between still and moving images. Since receiving an MFA at the Massachusetts College of Art & Design (MassArt) in 2023, March has been teaching (and learning) at MassArt, Emerson College, and Tufts University. March co-creates the zine cul de sac with marie igea and co-directs front room, an experimental gallery space in Somerville, MA, with Lena Warnke.

—Jessina Leonard

JL: Lucie, thanks so much for taking the time to speak about your work. I’d love to start with your series, La Piscine, which focuses on your family home in France. Can you tell us how this body of work began?

LM: I made most of these pictures during one week in August of 2021, on 4 rolls of medium format film—so in a practical sense the series began and ended there. But the seeds of this visual world were planted in my imagination very early on. When I was a child, we would spend summers in France at my grandparents’ house, where my mother and her five siblings grew up. This series is loosely focused on that place (only some of the pictures were actually made there; the swimming pool scenes, for example, were made elsewhere). It’s as much about my memory and experience of France as it is about a constructed idea of France, which has nothing to do with reality but is instead a mashup of other people’s memories, family lore, stories, and films. From these disparate fragments, I’m piecing together a vision of a past experience in this (fabricated) place, but things will never be as they were before. It’s a doomed venture and that’s what I like about it.

JL: These images create a world defined by leisure, class, desire and memory, drawing on the aesthetic language of French filmmakers like Jacques Deray and Éric Rohmer. Time expands in these pictures: bodies recline and curve, light softens, flies become still. I’m curious how you understand this body of work in conversation with films like Deray’s La Piscine?

LM: The more time I spend with these pictures (or the more distance I have from the time of their making), the more they expand beyond the circumstances in which they were made. I was not thinking at all of Jacques Deray while making this work, but returning to it, the filmic influence is clear. Some parts of the series are nearly stop-motion, one shot after the other, as they appear on the contact sheet. I use cinematic “cuts” to move the scene from indoors to outdoors, or momentarily away from the action. Time is suspended—something I’ve absorbed from my long obsession with slow cinema.

French cinema in particular has imposed a kind of retinal impression on the way I make pictures. I saw at a young age Claude Berri’s films Jean de la Florette and Manon des Sources (both from 1986, based on novels by Marcel Pagnol)—that very specific south-of-France light is burned into my mind. Jacques Deray’s film La Piscine (1969) was also part of the repertoire. The film revolves around a swimming pool, which becomes a site of tension, desire, and looming threat. I’ve been using La Piscine as a working title for these pictures, but have moved beyond that initial reference. Lately, I’ve been returning to Alain Guiraudie’s work, particularly his film L’inconnu du lac (2014), which also explores, in a gay way, this relationship between desire and danger.

With my own pictures, I’m more interested in the anticipation than the action. There’s a knife on the kitchen table, the languorous bodies, the flies on the foot—and yet nothing is actually happening. It might be just another summer afternoon, or it might be that everyone is waiting around for the end of the world, or some other terrible thing, to unfold. Nothing is ever resolved.

JL: Your series, Core Sample, turns towards gesture, archives, and absence. Where does the title come from and how does it connect to the work?

LM: The title Core Sample refers to the process of extracting a long cylindrical piece of the earth (usually rock or sediment) to study the geological history of a particular area. I had been photographing road cuts—the official term for the blasting of rock to make way for a road—and was interested in how the cut rock revealed layers of deep time. I started to think of a core sample as a metaphor for what a photograph could do. At the same time, I was thinking about my paternal grandparents’ memory loss. As is common with dementia and Alzheimer’s, they were often only able to recall moments from their childhoods. Eventually, they reassumed child-like states themselves (entirely dependent on the care of others, loss of language, etc.). Core Sample imagines this return—not just to childhood or a few generations back, but all the way to when we were rock and dust, to a place before memory. And of course, we’ll all end up back there, so in a way it’s also about looking very far into the future, beyond our little human existence and consciousness. But the narrative doesn’t unfold chronologically in one direction or the other; I’m interested in the simultaneous experience of big time and small time.

JL: How do you think about sequencing and narrative with Core Sample? I am particularly drawn to the refrain of the red-orange abstract images, which echo the photograph, earlier in the sequence, of a red leather chair with a white vase balancing on it.

LM: I like to use randomness in sequencing. I play a kind of Cage-ean game I call “52 pick-up” where instead of throwing a deck of cards onto the floor, I throw a bunch of small prints onto the floor and break up whatever pre-conceived order or narrative I had for the pictures. From there, I make adjustments. I love repetition—I think of it like a refrain in music. The red pictures you mention are taken from a photograph I found in my grandmother’s basement after her death: a 5x7 inch glossy Walgreens-style print of her red chair with an empty white vase on it. It’s an incredible photograph—totally banal in some ways, but also entirely mysterious and accidentally beautiful in the way that only vernacular photographs can be. I took a “core sample” from this photograph, zooming way into the red of the chair and extracting a piece of it, letting all the dust from the original print remain. That dusty red sample reappears throughout the sequence, functioning like a blinking eyelid periodically shielding the sun as the viewer experiences an Aleph-like flood of images (a reference to Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “The Aleph”: an Aleph is a point in space that contains all other points, allowing you to see everything that is happening in the universe simultaneously).

JL: Why do you use photography to talk about the past?

LM:  I read once of a door “polished to a mirror-like sheen so that it looks like where you are going is where you have already been.” (Jennifer Bloomer’s essay “D’Or” in Sexuality & Space, ed. Beatriz Colomina). I think photography is a lot like that door; the nature of the medium is such that it’s always talking about the past, but in a kind of helicoidal way.

My work often incorporates pictures from my family archives and in this way deals directly with the past. I’ve been thinking about archives more generally, especially in the context of Israel’s looting and destruction of Palestinian archives. In many ways, the question “Who gets to have an archive?” is the same question as: “Who gets to have a future?” (“What future?” asks Isabella Hammad in Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative.) The destruction of a library in Gaza has everything to do with Israel’s broader genocidal campaign. Preserving the past is also about envisioning a futurity.

JL: Along with your own photographic practice, you also publish a collaborative zine, cul de sac, and have made work alongside other artists, such as for your recent exhibition, I wake up in your bed, with Lena Warnke and Martha Schnee at Gallery 263 in Cambridge, MA. How do you understand collaboration in your art practice?

LM: I made my very first pictures of and with my sister. I was immediately conscious of what she was giving to the process. We’ve continued to collaborate over the last decade, making pictures together, including in La Piscine and Core Sample. She’ll often say, “Don’t you want to take a picture of me doing this?” She has always straddled the subject-creator positions, which I once thought of as distinct (now I know better...haha). Breaking down the boundaries between subject and maker and questioning traditional notions of authorship have become central questions in my practice. cul de sac and I wake up in your bed have been ways to work through that unlearning, and to sort out what it means materially.

JL: At the end of a semester, I often like to ask my students a question: why photography? I am curious what your answer to this would be—what drives you to this medium and to keep making pictures?

LM: To paraphrase one of Joanna Zylinksa’s ideas in her book Nonhuman Photography: a photograph is a reminder of the sun. To work with light as a medium means contending with our beginning and our extinction. Not to be dramatic but…what could be more meaningful than that? I like how photography makes me slow down. I like how it makes me think about the world and my place in it. What do I choose to look at? And how do I choose to see it? These are enormous questions with political, moral, ethical, philosophical, and aesthetic implications. It often feels completely absurd to make pictures at a time like this. Many of my students last semester were wondering, “What’s the point of all this anyway, given how terrible the world is?” We got into a bit of a doom spiral, so I tried an exercise where I invited everyone to play devil’s advocate to those feelings of hopelessness. We spent the rest of the class period brainstorming reasons to keep making art. It turns out there were a lot of reasons.

JL: What are some recent projects you have worked on?

LM: My girlfriend, Lena Warnke, and I have been making pictures collaboratively for the past two years on our friends’ farm in upstate New York. Last October, we had a one-day showing of some of this work on the property, the work of the sun + the play of the wind. We spent time last summer making prints (gelatin silver only!) and trying some things out. For example, we buried a print and decided to just leave it in the ground until October. It was generative to move away from a framed-photos-on-a-wall mindset and to experiment with installing outside, letting the sculptural, tactile, and olfactory elements of the landscape and farm infrastructure enter the work.

JL: Thanks so much, Lucie. More about Lucie’s work here.