Photographer, visual artist, Valérie Belin was elected in 2024 to the Academy of Fine Arts. Trained first at the Fine Arts of Versailles, then at the National School of Art of Bourges, influenced by American minimal art and Italian Baroque, the visual photographer showed her first exhibition in 1994: her famous series Crystalcrystal objects, in black and white, framed very closely, where everything becomes light. Since then, she has continued to develop an art where beings and objects are like specimens at the heart of the image, where incredible beauty rubs shoulders with cold and emptiness, where identities are blurred according to stereotypes. A photograph that gives the viewer a feeling of strangeness that stays with them for a long time….
Valérie Belin is welcomed this year to the Paris Photo festival, as part of the course Elle X Paris Photos for the exhibition of new unpublished photos.
A very strange beauty
With a 30-year career and 45 photographic series exhibited around the world, Valérie Belin has undeniably established herself as one of the references in contemporary photography. When we delve into his work, a disturbance appears. Is it an identity disorder, image disorder or reality disorder? Hard to be sure. However, behind this disorder there is always a strange beauty. “My job is to exaggerate what's happening on the surface of things. And sometimes, she explains while talking about her series Mannequins (2003)it is by approaching very closely that we realize that everything is false. What I wanted to show is the lie of beauty. There is a form of self-alienation in all the representations of women and men that I have made until today.”
And by photographing beauty, Valérie Belin formed her own idea of it: “beauty is also danger, the incarnation of a form of stereotype. I think we all need models to form ourselves, however the excess of models tilts our identity into something destructive. Today, the diktat of images could also be a definition of beauty.”
The human figure as a blank canvas
With the arrival of digital technology, the work of the visual photographer has evolved. From film cameras, she moved to digital portraits with color and superimpositions of images and shapes. However, the human figure still inhabits a whole section of his latest series: “Today I work with agency models who I use as blank canvases where I create a character from scratch. This creation of characters is a bit what defines my current work. We could almost talk about collage. There is a very strong play of appropriation which allows me to continue to evoke this self-alienation on which I was already working on film. But I don't make portraits of the soul, rather that of the warring psyche of today's women. My subjects continue to emerge from the magma of everyday life.”
Photography is an art of the eye
For Valérie Belin, photography is above all a look. However, for her, that of the spectator counts at least as much as that of the artist: “When I create a photograph, a series, images, it is about trying to provoke an experience which is that of bringing us back to ourselves, of pushing the spectators to dream. I say this in the sense that my photographs try to confront us with a mirror that looks at us, in which we see ourselves, which ultimately forces us to look at ourselves. And beauty is precisely this gateway for the gaze which pushes us to go elsewhere, into all the layers of the work. A work of art for me is also that, something that resists complete interpretation, always with a bit of mystery and dreaminess.”
To come and visit Paris Photosmeet at the Grand Palais in Paris from November 7 to 10, 2024.
Sound clips
- Archive of Roland Barthes in Interviews with Roland BarthesFrance Culture, 23/02/1977
- Archive of George Didi Huberman in The Paths of Philosophy on 26/06/2018
- Chanson : Taxi Girls – Mannequin taken from the album Looking for the Boy (2010)
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