I Am Still Afraid of the Dark

Roxane Moreau, born in 1994 in Reunion Island, lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She began her journey in the fashion and luxury industry in Paris for a decade. In 2022, her desire for a more authentic artistic approach led her to join the International Center of Photography (NYC).

Moreau's photographic story begins with a series of portraits of women, a work that finds its place in the pages of Vogue Italy. Over the years, due to her multicultural background with a Creole father and a jewish sephardic mother, her work has evolved towards a deeper exploration, delving into themes of uprooting, transgenerational memory, and cultural heritage.

Her artistic dedication to understanding the complexity of human existence manifests through a creative rather than purely documentary approach. Her photography becomes a conversation between the past and the present, reflecting the pain and poetry of our humanity.

Born out of my experience with navigating anxiety and depression, it is through this series that I question the very fabric of what is real.

Sometimes I wonder if the world around me even exists, and it is in these moments of altered awareness that I am profoundly impacted by beauty and hardness in equal measure. During these moments of crisis, it is as though my soul hovers above my body, bending the boundaries of my existence.

Since living in a country that is not my own (the United States), I had always longed to return to my roots in Reunion Island, seeking repair in my foregone childhood. The deeper my crisis, the more I yearned for the peace found in the raw nature of my homeland. And yet, I could not bring myself to leave. My compulsion to persevere until I found “success” made leaving New York City impossible. This, of course, perpetuated my internal crisis, thus detaching me even further from reality.

This was when echoes of Greek myths began to permeate my thoughts. In fleeting moments of hope, I envisioned myself as Ulysses, the hero of my own odyssey. But as night fell and my thoughts grew heavy, I descended into the shadowy depths of Hades, my soul aimlessly wandering its abyss.

The black and white photographs in this collection are reflections of my deepest turmoil, moments where I created images I had never dared to before. Until now, revisiting images of nature taken during moments of dissociation was too painful, as they are stark reminders of a time when reality felt foreign.

The color photographs symbolise my attempts to reconnect with reality during brief respites from my mental state. In these times, I felt deeply connected to the earth, drawing its energy to ground myself and reconnect with the world.

Ironically, these often drift back into the mythical, mirroring the dreamlike state so characteristic of my depression.

This body of work bears witness to the threshold between a life I am yet to fully embrace and one that now feels irretrievably lost. This is a visual purgatory of my emotional struggles – familiar landscapes that seem just out of reach, yet still offering me solace. From afar, Nature reminds me that I am her child, that I am part of a greater whole. She promises that once I surrender to her, I will finally be set free from torment, and embrace the light.

Until then…

I am still afraid of the dark.