With an insolent freedom / She throws to my face / The outlines of her nakedness / Concealed by the thickness of the ocean / That separates us
This series is an exploration of the female body.
Inspired by the freedom which emerges from her model, Clémence Elman chooses to represent the female outlines in a poetic way, but also without artifice.
To shot the series in the ocean as an unknown and unpredictable environment reinforces the sensation of bringing back the body to its natural state. The grainy esthetic of the photos is highlighting the mystery of the space-time surroundings and of the personal story of the character. The water carrying the floating members gives a disinhibited feeling of movement and of representation’s possibility. The dark blue-gray- green combination of colors points out the fact that the photos were taken in a cold and quite hostile milieu, at the end of the day. Indeed, the coast of Copenhagen is used as a setting for this spontaneous and impulsive research. One can feel, through the uncertain body parts close ups and the sometimes unframed photos, that the photographer put herself in the same situation as her model, setting up a game of attraction and rejection made uneasy by the movements of the waves and the current.
About Clémence Elman
(26.Jan.1992 – France) She is a French photographer based between Paris and Berlin. After graduating in Political Sciences (IEP de Toulouse), she moved to Berlin to study photography at the Nueue Schule Für Fotografie. She recently completed a 6-months internship within the VU’ Agency in Paris. Her work was lately published in the review batârde # 4: Compromis published by indekeuken (series “Waiting For – Calais” about the refugees camp in the North of France) and in the magazine Femme Fotale, Volume IV Leafless (“The Color Of My Blues”). In April she exhibited her series “The Color Of My Blues” in the frame of the PØLAR Festival in Paris and curated the event “Aubes: la jeunesse danoise en éveil” (Concert, conference and photo exhibition about gender and feminism issues) organized in partnership with the Danish Embassy in Paris.
Her photographic approach is combining documentary and intimate photography. Using her personal experiences and feelings, she translates them into social issues.
Her works have in common the “society” as a starting point, as an abstract and impersonal entity, existing as a whole. An entity that she then questions, to challenge an apparent homogeneity, by putting the individual in parallel with the collective. she explores, mainly through photography, but also sound and video, these questions of the relationship between the individual and the collective. She particularly questions the notion of identity and the feeling of belonging (or not) to a group and to an environment. She uses her background in political sciences (sociology, anthropology, history, urban planning, etc.) to document her artistic work thus favoring a multidisciplinary approach. [Official Website]
