Author Description

A meticulous survey of French photographer Valérie Belin's stunning series from Magicians, Bouquets and Lido to Brides, Bob, and Black Eyed Susan and continuing up to recent work including Super Models and All Stars.</p><p>French photographer Valérie Belin (born 1964) explores matter, the body, the living and the artificial--and the representations of all of these fraught categories--in a body of uncanny photographic work characterized by a fascination with light, detail and surface texture. <i>Valérie Belin</i> presents a survey of the artist's work since 2007, including her most recent series, <i>All Star</i>, a series of portraits of ghostly female figures that cut a vague, melancholy presence against cheery backgrounds derived from comic books. Coming on the heels of the photographer's celebrated retrospective at the Centre Pompidou, this volume includes a text by Quentin Bajac, Curator of Photography at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and offers an immersion into Belin's rare and unusual body of work that presents a photography of confusion and absence, where backgrounds are brought forward in front of their ostensible subjects and models and mannequins become indistinguishable.</p>