Valérie Jouve

French Artist Valérie Jouve..... She has created since 1994 an impressive body of work structured ongoing series, which she refers to as " families of images"...

Jouve delves into the rhythmic and visual tensions standard cityscapes photographed in pARIS,marseille and New York: frontal views of buildings streets and suburbs, chosen for their sheer architectural radiance or as backdrops for isolated figures.She asks her performers simply to embody a feeling.The photographer and the models then work together to find the best way to perform it: the figure participates his or her own reception, frozen in a choreographic, pictorial or theatrical expression co-produced whit the artist in a shared consciousness of the photograph's result.Each picture requires rehearsal and repeated photographing to achieve the perfect unsetting image that oscillates between documentary and cinematography;close, in this respect, to Jef Wall´s social pictures of the 1980, and borrowed from Jean-luc Godard,Robert Bresson and Jean Eustache.
Vincent Honoré