Valérie C. is an artist from Nice, her home town, located in the south of France. After studying Arts and Communication, she became a journalist as editor team leader in a French photo press agency. It has been her job for more than 22 years. She is a polymorphic artist and she likes to call herself an alchemist. Valérie uses many completely different techniques but all extremely enriching for her creative process, actually, her artistic work is essentially based on experimental photography and the alliance with nature and her environment.
In 2007, she trained herself in contemporary photography and more recently, very quickly she fell in love with portraiture and especially double exposure. But she had to push the process even further, she had the impression that I was missing something. During the lockdown period due to the covid crisis, experimental and alternative photography without a camera became an obvious experimentation. Valérie discovered with passion these old techniques which date from the middle of the 19th century, such as cyanotype and lumen print first. Also, passion by very old photography: she loves to make finds in flea markets, as vintage photography like Nadar, Roll agency or shot with daguerreotype. Her mind wants and absolutely does a fusion of nature and the captured past.
Valérie is passionate about Art history, using the artistic codes of academic painting that she studied during her school pathways and also the photojournalism code through her job, in her compositions. As long as the result is not perfect as her mind had imagined it, she will push the vice to start over and over. One of the main influence of her art comes directly from Japanese art, so pure and inspiring landscapes, and the synergy she has with nature around her and the vibration that comes from for heart and her body. She is also passionate about the human and the imprint that living things let over time.
For her, photography captures a moment of life for eternity, the living is part of a cycle, of a beginning and an end. This printing process on leaves links, in her paradigme, is this paradox. Valérie has been doing a lot of internal "work" from several years, following a burnout, she, then, reconnected to her soul and what it wanted to show, to make visible. It is not possible to bring the past back to the present, but photography let traces, let a legacy, like a family legacy. Valérie has search into trans-generational memories and currently she is digging through family archives looking for old photos of her ancestors. A bit like Indiana Jones goes in search of some treasures. Sometimes, you come out of buried stories, like an uncle who died very young during the Second World War or also happiness times of life.
She does not use a UV lamp but only the sun’s UV. As the UV index must be at least eight hours to limit insolation, she only works on this process in the spring and summer. Like a seasonal job. But it is important for her, in her process, to follow the seasons and the climate. As nature follows the cycle of life. Being in the flow of life and having a lot of patience are two essential ways.