Paris's Jérôme de Noirmont Gallery is currently presenting "Black-Eyed Suzan," a show of strange photographs by Valérie Belin, through January 27. In these images, flowers and women merge to form a kind of disorienting wallpaper, which charms viewers even as it invites questions about feminine ideals of beauty. The very limited series — there are only three prints of each image, plus an artist's proof — can be colorful, enchanting, and even disturbing. ARTINFO France sat down with Belin recently to discuss her ideas on beauty, why she turns living things into objects (and vice-versa), and why fashion photography is not her thing.

What is your relationship to artistic beauty?

The constant search for beauty is especially linked to my connection to painting, to the depiction of detail that can be seen in Mannerism, for example. I'm thinking of Bronzino, his jubilant way of depicting the beauty of the material world so exactly. In my work, beauty also appears in expressions that are beyond the real. It's connected to an over-sized treatment of the norm. For me, the definition of beauty is excessive.

Does your work create a distancing effect from appearances and media images?

My images always involve a double reading. You can appreciate, in an intrinsic way, the formal beauty of the subject. But, whether I show beautiful or ugly things, like smashed cars, I try to reach a more critical level, to question our reasons for loving a particular thing, or for being afraid of another thing. I always show things at the limit of the beautiful and the monstrous.

How did "Black-Eyed Suzan" come about?


From the beginning of my career, there has been a Surrealist aspect to my photos. My images of Venetian mirrors already incorporated this assemblage effect when they were taken. Today, I'm using two images to create a new image. At first I had the idea of using photos of movie stars to show their alienation, their non-visibility, in a kind of erasing process. I first made copies on transparencies, using the Internet, but then I decided to make my own portraits, by finding women who would look like 1950s movie icons.

How do you set up these photo shoots in the studio and what techniques do you use?

I used professional models. The shoots included a hairdresser and makeup artist. I first took photos of the models with very simple lighting, like natural light. Then, I took pictures of bouquets of flowers, with a stylist's help, someone I turn to every time I want to include flowers in my work. This time I wanted very frontal bouquets, almost two-dimensional, that would act like patterned repetitions on the surface of my negative. These were silver prints done in a darkroom, and I reworked them with Photoshop to remove the overload of information from the combination of the two images. In my work, beauty often comes from this kind of subtraction from realism. For the flower images, I reduced the range of colors to three or four tones.

You create a back-and-forth movement between the human being and the flowers.

Yes. There's this equivalence between things and beings. I turn people into things, to make photographic sculptures of them. On the other hand, when I photograph objects, I give them an energy that animates them. A crashed car will transmit the energy of the impact, the energy of the accident printed on the object. This energy is doubled by photographic techniques, such as the point of view or the lighting.

Will you return to still-life photography?

Of course. It's a fundamental part of my work. The movement from one thing to another, from the object to the human, is a basic part of my practice. It's true that with "Black-Eyed Suzan" I tried a new hybridization, between the living and the petrified, which creates a different effect. These young women are petrified by a sort of plant wallpaper, into which they are melded. They are literally part of the decoration. These flowers have a somewhat morbid energy. The ambivalence and the artificiality of these faces are not a break from my previous work. You can find the same kind of arrangement. These women are arranged in a very rigid style.

These glossy images must have attracted attention from fashion magazines. Could you see yourself working within that industry?

The parallels between my work and fashion photography are inevitable, since I use the same tools as in commercial images. I play with that. But I could never do real fashion photography, since my images are never in the service of a clothing line or a product and remain disturbing. Even if magazines are looking for more unusual visions, I would be very annoyed by the conditions imposed by a fashion shoot. I don't see any reason to do it.