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VALERIE BELIN, S/t, 1997 (foto del salón con objetos y espejos) |
Among the ranks of young french artists it is frequent to find the name of Valérie Belin who understands photography as a means of researching forms and lifestyles, as a way of reaching people and places, ideas and concepts that treated in any other way wouldn't have found the same visual treatment. Curious by nature, Valérie Belin thinks about colour from the perspective of black and white, about depth from the fixed plane of the photographic eye. Her work, always in series, has been based on the idea of trespassing those forms, those almost always shiny bodies, to step into the other side like Alice in Wonderland.
In a few weeks, you will be leaving for Morocco to work on the series you have been doing for several months now, Les Mariages. Why Morocco?
At the outset, the idea of weddings came about because of my taste for ceremonies. When I only photographed objects, I myself organised a sort of ceremony or ritual to place the objects in the shot I wanted. Now I like the exercise of adapting to a ritual situation in which I am not in control of how things develop. At first I had in interest in all weddings, in any type of environment, and then I realised that foreign weddings in France, particularly Moroccan weddings, had many more ceremonial elements to them. Moroccan brides change their dress several times, wearing between seven and twelve different dresses over the course of the celebration. Traditional weddings are organised by 'negafas', marriers who own the wedding dresses and lend them or rent them to the family for the occasion. Moroccan families living in France who remain very attached to their own culture prefer to hold the weddings in Morocco and generally wait for the summer to do so. So I'm going to be spending at least three weeks of August in Rabat at a 'négafa's' home. This way she can take me to a different wedding every day. This time I'll be able to discover other celebrations like baptisms or the ceremony for pregnant women during their seventh month.
Would that make you a sort of reporter then?
I´ve already been faced with that sort of situation in the previous series, The Bodybuilders, where I had to come across an unknown environment to take the photos I wanted. I started out by putting classified ads in a specialised magazine. Finally, I went to bodybuilding competitions. I really met incredible people. And I realise that now, that's part of the work. I love to go to unknown situations and penetrate in a world that I have to make my own. I feel a bit like Alice in Wonderland. In a different genre, in the meat series, I also had to penetrate a very special environment in Rungis, to be able to get access to meat lockers where the quarters of beef that I wanted to photograph were. And negotiating with the Rungis butchers is no small feat.
Now, with your last few series, there is an anthropological dimension to your work. What would you say about this albeit surprising development, since you began by photographing inert objects, still lives, glass, mirrors, flowers, dresses, cars…
I think there are two reasons for that. First there's a personal reason, my own personal path that has in fact lead me from the inert to the living, the Bodybuilders series brings out an explicit presence of the body which had merely been hinted to metaphorically prior to that. And I am increasingly interested in others. The second reason has to do with the evolution of a profession. I think that photo-journalism, photographs in the press, are tending to disappear. Fewer and fewer reports are being requested. To illustrate a study or any article, people rather sieve through catalogues from image banks for pictures that have no copyrights. A photographer auteur is now an artist, who is suddenly delving into territory that had previously belonged to journalism and is now more or less deserted. (…)
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