L’Oeil de la Photographie, A column by Jean-François Camp for the “A Photographer for Eurazeo” Award.
Eurazeo is an investment company, with which we created this € 10,000 award that rewards a photographer for their subject on the theme “Tell us a story”.
Our winner of this tenth edition is Sophie Zénon: she presented “In the mirror of the rice fields”, a personal story about her Italian origins. Her delicate and refined images, tinged with nostalgia, won over the entire jury.
Between the two wars, her grandmother Marie worked in the rice fields of the Po plain. It was exhausting work, feet in the water: like hundreds of others, she transplanted the young rice plants and uprooted the weeds. All these women slept in dormitories on the Colombara farms. Sophie Zénon decides to go there to pay tribute to her grandmother and discovers that all the installations have remained the same for almost a century. In this atmosphere where time has stood still, she creates a whole body of work from images found and transformed, then reconstructs her own story as an invitation to rethink memory.
Sophie Zénon pursues a personal research, off the beaten track, her long silhouette and her clear eyes make her an engaging personality in the world of photography and I am happy that this award can give her the recognition she deserves. An exhibition of her work will be inaugurated on February 6, 2020 at the Hotel de l ‘Industrie – place Saint Germain des Prés.
The Young Talents Award, worth € 5,000, initiated with the support of the École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie d’Arles, under the direction of Marta Gili, was awarded to Camille Kirdinis.
Jean-François Camp
The award-winning photos “In the mirror of the rice fields” were made thanks to the grant of the “Residence for Photography” Prize from the Treilles Foundation, of which Sophie Zenon was the winner in 2015.
