Finalist – Prix Picto de la Mode 2024 : Clara Belleville

Clara Belleville was born in 1996, she lives and works in Paris. After obtaining her Baccalauréat, she went straight to Gobelins, the image school from which she graduated in 2017. Born from her observation of her immediate surroundings, her first projects sketched the everyday life of her generation, people moving or doing nothing, looking at each other or embracing. She has taken part in several group exhibitions, including Anne Valérie Hash at the Cité de la dentelle, Calais (2016) and La Petite Robe Noire at the Gerlain Champs Elysées (2014). Her work Acte I – Mémoires, produced between 2012 and 2019, was exhibited at the Galerie éphémère in Paris (2019), was a finalist in the Bourse du Talent Mode (2017) and was published on Fisheye (2017). Her work Mélodie et l’été, produced between 2014 and 2018, was published on Vogue Italia (2019). Her project Entre nous, produced between 2013 and 2020, was a finalist at the Hyères Festival. It gave rise to an exhibition at 3537 and was published in book form by Paolo Roversi’s Stromboli publishing house in July 2022. She appears alongside several other photographers on the cover of Dazed Spring 2023.

« Summer Tales »

“This series, Summer Tales, is part of an overall project looking at the everyday human being. In a mixture of spontaneous and staged photographs, I’m interested in moments that are devoid of crucial moments, which, through their emptiness, give people their full importance. Those moments when what matters is not the action taking place, but the force of the present that exists like an eternity. Those moments when each minute has no importance, but so much. These images are portraits that might seem naïve viewed separately, but whose seriality reveals their narrative force. It’s like a fairytale where you wonder what will happen to the characters who never look at you. It’s also this dramatic intensity and this open door to a whole range of possibilities that I’m trying to observe.”