the essential
Chantal Mailho is the fourth generation of photographers in her family. For more than thirty years, film has stuck with him. She will be present at the Villeneuve-la-Comptal book fair this Saturday, November 16.
She devoted her entire life to the eighth Art, that of capturing reality: photography. Chantal Mailho is a virtuoso with the lens, and one of the youngest female photographers when she moved into her studio at just eighteen years old when she had just started her studies at the photography school. from Nîmes.
Chantal, like many artists, traveled around quite a bit before returning to her native Lauragais. After fifteen years of work, notably in the Lot, then in Tarn-et-Garonne, this enthusiast of exposure times and shutter speed settled with weapons – rather with photo equipment – and luggage in Castelnaudary. It was during this period that the sky fell on his head, a real leaden screed under which many do not recover. She had just been diagnosed with one of the most aggressive forms of breast cancer.
The fight against the crab
Far from being discouraged, Chantal declared at the time: “This thing that is in me is only an error, it does not belong to me”. So she refused to live differently. An incredible strength that she declared to have drawn from the love of her three children. Despite the numerous hospitalizations, the terrible chemotherapies, and the periods of extreme fatigue that resulted, she continued to press the shutter button on her camera at every opportunity. Certainly, her studio and her store were closed, but the art portraitist refused to give up.
Today, Chantal Mailho finally sees the end of the tunnel. The long-awaited word remission was pronounced by the doctors, and of course, she started again with a vengeance.
A photographer “committed for life”
She uses this victory over illness every day. She thus created the association “Photographer for Life”. “Art therapy” which uses artistic creation to make (and regain) contact with life, no longer holds any secrets for her. As part of her associative activities, Chantal Mailho makes it her duty to spread the good photographic word in cities, but also in rural areas. She gives numerous conferences on the history of photography and gives instructions and initiations on the film process (which dates, let’s not forget, from the very creation of photography). Chantal is an artist, but above all a purist who shows the difference between classic photography on film and digital photography.
These photos, which undergo no retouching, true works of art, represent the world, or its inhabitants, as they are. The same look at landscapes or men that the great painters have had over the centuries. “Real for real,” she proclaims. The success of his exhibitions cannot be denied.
