The new version of the Elles x Paris Photo website is online! What’s new? Two exclusive interviews – one written and one filmed – every month. An event highlighting our desire to give more visibility to women photographers. Let’s take a look at the first participant of the new edition 2.0: Valérie Belin.
In November 2020, Paris Photo and the Ministry of Culture, in association with Fisheye Magazine, launched a website dedicated to Elles x Paris Photo – a physical and digital circuit highlighting the female artists featured at the heart of the fair. A way to give them a voice, through written and filmed interviews. On March 8, 2021, Paris Photo extended the programme and published a new video: that of Valérie Belin. The first in a new series of interviews that will be released every month!
Born in 1964 in Boulogne-Billancourt, Valérie Belin studied photography at the École des Beaux-arts de Versailles, then at the École nationale supérieure d’art de Bourges, as well as philosophy of art. With 45 series to her credit, the artist had continuously studied the body, things and beings, as well as their metamorphoses. A work nourished by a fascination for light and matter. “You could say that my work is characterised by, on one hand, a kind of excess of realism, precision and coldness and, on the other hand, a totally non-realistic, non-naturalistic aspect, like a kind of paradox between these two dimensions,” she explains.
If, according to her, men and women do not create the same images, this difference comes from a separation, and an assimilation of stereotypes acquired during childhood. Clichés that she likes to dismantle in her work. “I think that my work, deconstructing a certain number of these stereotypes, also deconstructs this too brutal separation between the feminine and the masculine,” she says.
© Fisheye l’agence
© Valerie Belin / Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Nathalie Obadia Paris / Bruxelles
