Philippine de Joussineau takes us to Iran, and Léo Derivot uses photography as a tool to question politics. Here are our readers picks.
Philippine de Joussineau
As a graduate from business school, Philippine de Joussineau started her professional life in Paris as a sale strategy consultant. In July 2018, she decided to leave her job in order to devote herself to photography.
“Two documentaries changed my life. Demain (Tomorrow, ed.), by Cyrille Dion and Mélanie Laurent, was a real wake-up call on crucial subjects such as agriculture, health and education. This film was the starting point of a long introspection period during which I sought the meaning of my life and my actions. The second film that influenced me was Salt of the Earth about photographer Sebastião Salgado. His work and his personal commitments were so inspirational. It is this desire to raise awareness among others that made me commit to a photographic practice,” Philippine de Joussineau tells us.
She signed with Longueurs d’onde (Wavelength, ed.) her first series, made in Iran in the summer of 2018. “The various meetings and research I did during this trip gave me a better understanding of the dark and bloody history of this country and its people, she says. In optics, wavelengths shape light and reveal colours across its spectrum. Their interactions, through contrasts and perspectives, express the hope of a people to emerge from a troubled past, towards a better future.” A poetic vision of Iran.
© Philippine de Joussineau
Léo Derivot
“My series
Ecran LCD (LCD Screen, ed.) was born from questioning the evolution of our relationship with the photographic image, as a result of our immersion in an increasingly virtual, dematerialised world. Nowadays, we only give a few tenths of a second to productions that run on an impalpable news feed”. According to Daniel Van Dr Gucht, “Industrial companies turn their members into drug addicts; it’s the powerful form of mental pollution,” explains Léo Derivot, a young photographer with a degree in Fine Arts from the Sorbonne.
Fascinated by Daniel Van Dr Gucht’s book L’expérience politique de l’art : Retour sur la définition de l’art engagé (The political experience of art: Focus on the definition of committed art, ed.), Léo Déridot uses images and artistic creation to question politics. As a devourer of image, the modern man he depicts is imprisoned in a fictitious world, at the borders of reality and fiction. A political (and skeptical) series that invites the spectator, or rather the consumerist man, to stop, look and reflect.
© Léo Derivot
