Photo: Dreams of Eternity by Alexandra Catiere, Camera Clara Prize 2024

“The Breath of Being”. This series ofAlexandra Catiere to the poetic promise is winner of the 13^e prix Camera Clara. By following the humanist tradition, the Belarusian artist translates in his photographs taken to the bedroom a quest for the timeless and the universal. Everything is sensations, atmospheres and suspended moments. His photographs are exhibited at the BnF for our greatest pleasure.

Stopping time: this is the challenge that Alexandra Catiere takes on in each of her photographs and particularly in this series “The Breath of Being”, whose title suggests thatshe frees herself from the world appearances to touch the essential, that is to say the soul of individuals. She gets closer to the subject, even a little closer, to truly settle into a authentic relationship and share the magic of the moment of meeting.

Connect with others

From the Soviet Union to the United States via France, the photographer is interested in what connects human beingsmoving the cursor towards the universal and the timeless. She erases the rough edges of a society and an era to create a sort of family album. What do we have in common? Love, joy, the desire to live and all the emotions that pass through us. She casts the same sensitive and caring gaze on a forest in Minsk or in the Pyrenees as on Gabriel, Eva, Remi. Par simplicity of his compositions and the choice of black and whitethe artist offers a vision between nostalgia and poetry. “Faced with the trials of history, we realize that we cannot withdraw into ourselves,” she writes. It is our vital impulse to connect with others. »

An ultra-award-winning artist

It is this enthusiasm that touched the jury of the Camera Clara prize. He unanimously chose Alexandra Ctiere as the winner of his 13th^e edition with this series, bringing together as well as recent images taken 25 years ago. This former assistant to Irving Penn, born in 1978 in Minsk (Belarus) and based in France, has already been widely awarded (the first BMW residency at the Nicéphore Niépce museum in 2011, the Elysée prize in Lausanne in 2018), while it was selected in 2021 as part of the major commission for photojournalism “Radoscopy of France”.

A prize to support a singular photographic expression

Created in 2012this price is carried by the Grésigny foundation – a family philanthropic foundation sheltered by the Fondation de France – and “aims to show that camera photography is a singular and contemporary artistic expression”, explains the founder, Joséphine de Bodinat Moreno. “Since the beginning of the prize, we have seen a very great diversity of artistic approachesillustrating that camera photography is not confined but demonstrates great creative freedom. » If the common point between all the winners is this relationship with light and time, “it was particularly noticed with Alexandra Ctiere, whose works are imbued with delicacy and grace », she concludes.

The series The Breath of Being by Alexandra Catière, Camera Clara Prize 2024, is exhibited from December 10, 2024 to March 30, 2025 at the BnF, François Mitterrand site as part of Photography at all costs. A year of photographic prizes at the BnF.