Pablo Mira

The hour before Passé Simple. Pablo Mira is in his dressing room, jacket half-buttoned, doing the small things one does in the small minutes before a performance: a sip of water, a glance at the mirror, the kind of attention that does not yet have an audience. Ludwig Favre photographs the loge first, then follows him onto the stage. What this Pablo Mira portrait sequence records is the transition between those two rooms, the moment when a person about to speak in public becomes a person speaking in public. The dressing room is small and warm and unposed; the stage is wide and lit. The same face passes through both. The show’s title plays on a French grammatical tense, the past that we tell rather than the past we live, and the photographs hold the same double register: the quiet of the loge before the show, the room finding its rhythm after. The full Pablo Mira portrait series belongs to a longer tradition of theatrical reportage, the kind of photography that respects the work of comedy by attending to its labor rather than its punchline.

Each frame offers a precise geometry, an echo of Ludwig Favre’s deliberate path through space.

The visual record photography series by Ludwig Favre is available as a limited edition fine art print, signed and numbered.