Laura Pannack, a British photographer and Mélanie Wenger from France, who were awarded the twenty-second HSBC Prize for Photography by the executive committee last January, are presenting their winning series at the Galerie Esther Woerdehoff. This is the first exhibition of a tour that will also go to Aix en Provence, Toulon and Bordeaux, and marks the publication of their books by Actes Sud.
Maria Garcia Yelo, from Spain, director of PHotoEspaña and artistic advisor for this edition of HSBC Prize for Photography, who had short-listed the ten photographers, had this to say about Laura Pannack’s work, “The combination of a very sensitive empathy for the subject of her interest and her capacity to find and show intimate and delicate moments of the everyday life make her project Youth Without Age, Life Without Death a visual poem about a world destined to disappear in the end, as any world is. Between documentary shots and imaginative sets, the spaces, routines, people and objects she “lived” among in a remote part in Romania and that she “has brought” us to see, become a real universal metaphor for the fragility of life.”
About Mélanie Wenger, Maria Garcia Yelo writes, “The photographer met the ‘The Lady of the Dolls’ in the spring of 2014, in a forgotten corner in the Monts d’Arrée of Brittany. Since then, she has been visiting and photographing her, with the fascination, love and fear of someone that finds a rare, fragile treasure, hidden in a self-built universe. Mélanie Wenger has managed, with patience and tenderness, to reveal the story of Marie-Claude, forgotten by society for over 50 years, during which she has created her own microcosm. She lives in a world with no place for memory, comfort or company but full of a delicacy and beauty without parallel. Only a photographer with very special sensitivity and without prejudgement could describe, in pictures, such a wonder.”
Laura Pannack & Mélanie Wenger
Winners of the HSBC Prize for Photography
From 13th May to 10th June 2017
Galerie Esther Woerdehoff,
36 rue Falguière,
75015 Paris
France
