Artist
Clémence Elman
Born in 1992 in Paris, Clémence Elman spent her childhood in Pau (South west of France). In 2015, she graduated in political sciences (Sciences Po Toulouse) and moved to Berlin, where she began studying photography at the Neue Schule Für Fotografie. Following this, she joined the national school of photography (ENSP), in Arles, from which she graduated this year.
She works in particular on the question of exoticism and on the family, using in her aesthetics the form of photographic documentary-fiction.
This year, she is one of the photographers selected for the 35th edition of the Hyères Fashion, Photography and Fashion Accessories Festival at Villa Noailles.
La Fin des Voyages (End of Travels)
La Fin des Voyages is a series that questions the notions of exoticism and travel, as well as their representation in photography.
I come back to my family garden and the bourgeois environment in which I grew up, in the south-west of France. I take, as a starting point, the relationship maintained by my family members with Elsewhere, references to the history of Western art and memories of childhood immortalized in the family photographic archives.
In the form of a documentary-fiction, the staged photos question, in a broader way, the complex representations of this exotic and erotic Elsewhere, in which the issues of cultural reappropriation and domination are underlying, notably through the accessories, patterns, colors and poses used.
This series is concomitant with my thesis completed this year on «The Jungle. Construction, representation and existence of a territory of dominations«, a theoretical and visual research on exoticism issue.
It is with a certain kindness and a certain humor that I choose to stage my relatives in this photographic work which also deals with the family and the relationships that I maintain with the mine.