Claudine Doury in Maria

EXHIBITION

Amur

Claudine Doury, Paris, France | claudinedoury.com

Claudine Doury went to the Russian Far East for the first time in 1991, then in 1997, to witness the lives of the people who settled along the banks of the Amur River.

Twenty years later, she returned to the region in search of the Nanaï, Ultchi, and Nivkh families she had met on her previous trips. She wanted to bear witness to the passage of time on these families photographed at the time, but also to the changes that had taken place on a larger scale in these populations.

This current and intimate portrait of the native peoples of Amur allows us to redefine the contours of a territory that bears the traces of its history: the conquest of the East through the arrival of the Cossacks and the Russian settlement over the centuries.

Like the Amur River, Claudine Doury’s images constitute a set of layers, historical, temporal and physical. In an approach that is both artistic and documentary, her photography is a tangible form of the idea of loss, but also of what remains.

Claudine Doury is the 2017 winner of the Prize Marc Ladreit de Lacharrière – Académie des Beaux-arts for her project “A Siberian Odyssey,” which made possible the realization of this work.

Exhibition at Rencontres

Amur

French photographer, member of Agence VU’, represented by In Camera gallery, Claudine Doury lives and works mainly in Paris.

After studying journalism, she worked as a photo editor for Agence Gamma in Paris, for Contact Press agency in New York, and then for the French newspaper Libération. She became a photographer in 1989 and joined Agence VU’ shortly afterwards.

Her work addresses the notions of memory, transition and passage, especially around adolescence and travel, which are central themes of her work.

In 1999, she received the Leica Oscar Barnack Prize and a World Press Award for her work on the Peoples of Siberia, which led to the publication of her first monograph by Le Seuil.

In 2004, her second book, Artek, un été en Crimée, was published by Editions de la Martinière, and she received the Niépce Prize for her body of work.
She then published Loulan Beauty (2007); Sasha (2011), a work on the end of childhood; and L’homme nouveau (2017), a series that questions male identity.

In 2017 she was awarded a national commission on French youth from the Ministry of Culture and Communication, and the same year received the Marc Ladreit de Lacharrière Prize – Académie des Beaux-Arts to carry out her project Une odyssée sibérienne in 2018.

Her work is regularly exhibited in France and abroad, notably at Parc de La Villette, (Paris), the Rencontres d’Arles, Paris Photo, the Pavillon Carré de Baudouin (Paris), and the Villa Perochon (Niort). Her photographs appear in prestigious private and public collections, among which the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Fonds National d’Art Contemporain, artothèques of la Rochelle and of la Roche-sur-Yon, the Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne (Switzerland), the Fonds d’Art Contemporain in Meyrin (Switzerland), the Museu da Imagem in Braga (Portugal), Leica Camera, and Agnès B’s collections.