The Uncertain Beauty of the World

This monograph offers to discover Valérie Belin’s body of work, through over thirty series, from the 1970s to the present day, and to examine how her different series respond to each other, evolve and question our relationship to beauty, artifice and the impermanence of things. From the shooting to the retouching work, the photographer creates by successive touches and layers, like a painter playing on the ambivalence between the living and the artificial. Mixing color and B&W, her work invokes many references to the history of art.

‍Valérie Belin’s work is crossed by recurring questions, revealed in this book by putting her series in perspective. Exploding the chronological order, a game of correspondences takes place between the color and B&W images and the different series of the artist. The subjects she chooses are characterized by their plastic beauty or conversely by their trivial character. The people represented, whether they are models, transsexuals, clown figures or Michael Jackson look-alikes, are, for the most part, in a transitional state towards «the desire to transform themselves into images», says Valérie Belin, while her objects, such as vintage cars or others that have been involved in accidents, her engines or vintage dresses, seem to be animated, sublimated by the lens. Through an important work at the time of the shooting until the phase of retouching, of superimposing the layers, like a «digital palimpsest», Valérie Belin underlines all these ambivalences in the heart of the image. The latter one then takes its autonomy and de-realizes itself from its subject. The resulting images have a strong aesthetic and evocative power that embody both «the drama and beauty of the world,» as Sebastien Gokalp points out in his text.