The Weight of Water is a serie of self-portraits contrasting and colourful of modern-day sirens and nymphs.
After seizing the telluric forces of the series My Wild Tales, as a metaphor for an inner emotional tremor. Her characters, feminine creatures instinctively detach from controlled and played emotions. The omnipresent nature moves and cradles where water, wind and steam adorn a feminine vision; in a desire for the fluidity of the kind and energy. Thus the viewer enters a delicate and fresh world intertwined with the image of the life of the photographer Jennifer Orhélys.
In one Drop of water are found all the secrets of all oceans in one aspect of you are found all the aspects of existence.
—Khalil Gibran
It is a series with a unique style, dreamlike, extravagant, romantic, colourful, organised to the millimetre in the frame. Of course, these are fashion photographs, which presented as stories, or rather as skits. The photos of Orhélys tell they are narrative snapshots in the sense that we perceive systematically before and after. And often her photographs are surprising and invite to live in her strange and mysterious world.
About Jennifer Orhélys
Jennifer Orhélys navigates since childhood in cultural diversity, languages, and art. Jennifer has always been lucky to be in contact with the beauty and the surrounding wilderness. An intense visual experience that will feed her years later in her artistic expression: the photography. Jennifer Orhélys studied the Cinema and the History of Art in the Sorbonne-Panthéon, hence her photographic work inspired by the Pre-Raphaelite, and romantic periods of classical painting.
But in these uncertain times of ecological change, Jennifer Orhélys seems to have found a subtle way to portray her relationship to nature in grandiose landscapes. Through the emotion that carries her, Jennifer creates a colourful imaginary world, reflected by solitary heroines. Thus, the world around us becomes a hot topic, and the relationship between the Earth we live in, and the way we should treat it. The artist Jennifer grew up in a picturesque environment with mountains, trees and fields. It results in a force common to all his images, even if they sometimes overlap between peace and lonely melancholy. Jennifer Orhélys explores themes such as the fragility of nature and the world created by man in his dramatic and thought-provoking photographs. That’s why most of her works are self-portraits because Jennifer usually finds her places quiet and ideal.
In 2016, her work on self-portraiture was recognised and is part of the permanent collection of the Kiyosato Photographic Art Musèum, (a musèum dedicated to photography in the Kiyosato region of Hokuto City, Japan).
Jennifer Orhélys has exhibited from New York to Los Angeles and from Berlin to Japan. Her self-portraits have been featured in several major group exhibitions, such as the Berlin Foto Biennale / Magnum Agency (Palazzo Italia, Berlin), the Louvre Museum (Paris), Times Square (New York), the KD Gallery (International Biennial of Image, Nancy), Novotel Tour Eiffel (Paris), International Photography Week (Riedisheim), The Gallery Artist Corners (Hollywood)…
Her photographs lead him to participate in numerous exhibitions, and her images recognized in several national and international competitions. She regularly collaborates with the French and abroad press. [Official Website]
