Biography

Born and raised in Toulouse, Marie-Pierre Cravedi currently lives in Lausanne, Switzerland. She received a Bachelor in cinema from La Sorbonne, a Master in Photography from EFTI School, Spain, and a Master in Art Direction, option Photography, from ECAL in 2013.
After being the assistant of Alberto Garcia-Alix in 2009, she works as a freelance photographer.
Her work has been projected in the Musée de l’Elysée (Lausanne) in February, 2014, published in the British Journal of Photography in November, 2013, and exhibited in Festival Manifesto (Toulouse) in September, 2014. She has just won the International Photography Award Emergentes DST in Braga (September 2014).

My grandmother was called Camille Claudel

This work, born from the confusion on the identity of my grandmother Camille, finally deals with me, with my identity, my fears and my complexes.

With this project, it is the relationship between sculpture and photography that interested me most. Some objects, some parts of the body come to question the spectator about themes as confinement, loneliness, and relationship to the body.

My body, confined and tormented, is omnipresent.

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Photography seems inseparable from the timeline and the fear of death. More than fixing time, photography helps us to assimilate, having more time, moments that were only assimilated partially at the moment of the picture taking.
The picture will be a definitive trace of an emotion between a subject and an object, testifying that a link really existed.
However, this trace, in the case of family memory, is becoming opaque and the oral transmission languishes after a few generations: I know few details about my ancestors, whose pictures decorate the house walls. However, they died less than a century ago.
Used to report on reality, family photography rather reflects a deformed reality, influenced by the place of the photographer in the family, his relationships with the relatives, the way he perceives his family members, the poses of the models, the framing, the choice of the moment... Some members of the family appear more than others: it’s the case of children, who are today the main protagonists of family albums, a trend that began with Hidden Mothers, studio pictures of the nineteenth century, in which mothers were hidden under a sheet so that the child would appear alone.
The connection between reality and fiction is completely present in the memory construction. According to Paul Antze’s works, memory wouldn’t only be a reconstruction, but an imaginary construction. In my work, this idea is obvious as I suggest here my own interpretation of family.