Born in 1988 and native of Normandy, Clémentine Belhomme has been passionate about analogue photography since her earliest years. Spontaneous and instinctive, she started by photographing the world around her and directing her close family in it. After a Master’s degree in photography at the University of Paris 8, it was at the Condé School (Graphic Art and Design) that she tried to develop an individual world by using the photographic medium and a means of expression and experimentation. Clémentine Belhomme lives and works in Paris.
Why photomontage?
Photomontage came to me when the simple act of taking a photograph was no longer enough. It’s a hybrid art that blurs the lines between different media. It shows very clearly the act of making, photography then acts as a material where a vast number of fragments come together to tell a story, an idea, a visual poetry. Can you rebuild after the break-up and the destruction? So the photomontage game is to create a whole from the fragmented parts, and especially to play with the choice of what is inserted or what is deliberately left out. Perhaps it’s a kind of manipulation after all. The photomontage sets up several stages of creation and leaves room for some kind of happy accident, the lucky find sometimes surprises me,it often inspires me and invites me to create.
Would you say about your photographs that they are deliberately surrealist? Why that choice?
Surrealism is one of the movements in the history of art that made an impression on me and that inspires me today, on the other hand I never started creating something and saying to myself, “I want to do surrealist photography”. Surrealism affects me with its way of advocating a form of total freedom in creation, and in the themes it explores such as: the unconscious, the disturbing strangeness, the reification of human beings, veiled eroticism, the metamorphosis of the imagination and the dream etc.
Do you consider your creations political?
I don’t think there’s any such thing as an “apolitical” artist, an artist has to be like a ferryman, and offer the spectator a world view. Even there, it seems to me that my images sometimes take on a political dimension unconsciously. Myself I’m revolted by the violence of the world in which we live and the act of creation allows me to transcend the anger, the injustice, the feeling of powerlessness, and the fear that I feel. Today more than ever the world needs committed artists to reflect and to call into question the world which surrounds us. Art doesn’t have a frontier, it must travel, to be everywhere, to unite people and offer alternatives.
