Valérie Belin

“Black-Eyed Susan”, 2010. © Valérie Belin.

In her series “Black-Eyed Susan”, photographer Valérie Belin juxtaposes two images, a face and flowers, to create one. The decisive moment is no longer the process shooting but the research that is put into it afterwards.

Her eyes are the brush, the camera her palette. Valérie Belin, 47, a graduate of the Beaux-Arts de Bourges, photographes just like she paints. Inside. “I am very close to my tool and digital techniques. I use them not to refine, correct, but to brutalize the image, to exaggerate, to create the illusion. Isn't that the hallmark of art? ".

“Nerium Oleander” from the “Black-Eyed Susan” series, 2010.

© Valérie Belin.

“Nerium oleander” is the Latin name for a type of flowering shrub. It is also one of the eleven photographs in the “Black-Eyed Susan” series, taken in 2010. What's at stake? The superposition of two images - a face and flowers - to make one. If, in her first works devoted to crystal vases and glasses (1993), Valérie Belin worked on the light spectrum of objects, while remaining very close to the original process of photography, the series of women-flowers calls into question the photographic principle . The decisive moment is no longer the shooting but, as with the painter, the slow work of the studio, the digital retouching, the research on chroma, the equivalences of shapes and shades.

What strikes first is the plastic beauty of the faces, almost emptied of their soul. “Rigid, frontal, shadowless, expressionless beauty, 'Mad Men' or Lara Croft style,” says Valérie. These are stereotypes. “I always tackle kitsch, vernacular subjects, car wrecks, fruit baskets ordered on the Internet, or people who are already transformed into images - such as models, dancers, bodybuilders… I work on the cliché idea. I try to create and exacerbated those clichés. ”

The minimalist treatment accentuates the inhumanity of these portraits. Lack of historical context, frontality of point of view, identical framing ... Each face dissolves into the image.