Frank Lebon is fascinated by blood. It’s the connecting theme that flows through his first art book, One Blood, a photographic project that takes us through the Covid-19 pandemic, a type 1 diabetes diagnosis, and love, family and friendship.
“I’m always collecting some sort of imagery, but very rarely do I feel it’s worthy of sharing with the world,” the 30-year-old photographer and film-maker says from his bright and airy studio in south London. “With One Blood, I felt a real sense of serendipity, where all these connecting things came together to give it value and meaning.”
For the past decade, Lebon’s work has observed themes of death, family and the downright banal, subverted through his meticulous editing style: often, a portrait is scribbled over, torn apart and restitched, at times reminiscent of American counterculture figures such as Jim Goldberg, Larry Clark and Harmony Korine. His short films, meanwhile, have documented a crime-scene cleaner, London squats and a dog that had witnessed a murder. His work is often laced with a dark sense of humour, and Lebon has become a cult figure in the London art scene – as well as producing ad campaigns for brands including Gucci and Dior.
One Blood began in early 2020, when Lebon’s finger inadvertently covered half the flash of his digital camera while taking a photo of his mum, Camilla, washing the image in a luminous red light. For most, it would be a soon-deleted mishap. “It reminded me of blood,” Lebon says, moving his finger over the happy accident. “I love how the moon in the background gives the photo context, that I haven’t just dialled up the red.”
Lebon ordered blood testing kits and taught himself how to take samples from his own body. A few days later, he became seriously unwell; he was exhausted, dehydrated and urinating up to 40 times a day. He took himself to his local GP and met a junior doctor on her first ever shift. She didn’t know how to administer a blood test – but Lebon did, and ended up teaching her in the doctor’s room.
“It was like a signal that pointed me to the direction of making One Blood,” Lebon says – he was eventually diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. Prompted by the isolation of the pandemic, as well as the Black Lives Matter protests that erupted that locked-down summer, Lebon started thinking about bigger existential questions. “Looking back, I think a big part of all the decisions I made for this project was this idea that we’re all connected, and that underneath the surface we’re all the same – we all have blood running through us.”
One Blood flicks through intimate moments taken in the past three years. There’s Lebon’s girlfriend sleeping in bed; his naked dad (photographer Mark Lebon); his mum rolling a cigarette. And there are mundane scenes, too: a derelict park; street views of a hospital; blood donor transit bikes. Then, as Lebon calls them, the “blood portraits”, of friends and relatives with a garish red light cast over their faces, imitating the original accident that kicked off the project. Among these are microscopic images of blood samples he had collected from his subjects.
The project is also influenced by French surrealist photographer Jacques-André Boiffard. Lebon first saw his work at a 2014 retrospective at the Pompidou Centre in Paris, but it wasn’t until the making of One Blood that the photographer rediscovered his works and began making connections with his own practice. Among the similarities are Boiffard’s focus on themes of death, his comically grotesque closeup shot of a big toe – Lebon once spent a period of time photographing his own big toe after he broke it – and medical examinations of blood.
“It was so spot-on with the work that I was doing,” Lebon says. This photographer that I’ve been subconsciously connected to since I was 20 had made the biggest impression on me. And here I was, doing something that he did back then. When you make those connections, it’s like a moment of enlightenment.”
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