The Camera Clara Prize was awarded last night at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. The award, worth €6,000, recognizes a photographer working in large format. The jury, composed of leading professionals in the field, met to select the winner of the 2015 prize Yann Laubscher and two finalists Duane Prentice and Bertrand Stofleth.
Yann Laubscher
Born in 1986 in Switzerland.
Begun five years ago in Russia, the project L’Appel originates in journeys undertaken by Russian families in the 1960s in search of nature, solitude, space, and silence. Intentionally evocative of the atmosphere of Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker, through an introspective exploration of moods, tensions, and poetic frictions tied up with a sensibility specific to the effects of mutual interaction between man and nature, Yann Laubscher juxtaposes portraits and landscapes that shed light on that collective experience in which he is both an active participant and an observer.
Duane Prentice
Born in 1960 in Canada.
In the series Remnants—Searching for a Presence in Absence, Duane Prentice bears witness to the overexploitation of Nature on Vancouver Island, to our nostalgia for Nature yet untouched by human intervention, and to Nature’s capacity for recovery.
Bertrand Stofleth
Born in 1978 in France.
Rhodanie is a series of photographs focusing on riverside landscapes, each corresponding to a different mode of inhabiting and developing the land. Between 2007 and 2014, Bertrand Stofleth traveled along some 850 km of the Rhône River from its sources in the Alpine glaciers in Switzerland to its delta on the Mediterranean coast. The artist specifically insists on examining the identity of the shoreline by methodically exploring the river’s course and its banks. He builds a dialog between the fluvial landscape and the spaces bordering the river, foregrounding the different forms of land use and development.
*The Jury was composed by Joséphine de Bodinat Moreno, founder of the Camera Clara Prize and CEO of Fondation Grésigny, Audrey Bazin, art director La Galerie Particulière – Paris – Bruxelles, Dominique de Font-Reaulx, director of Musée national Eugène Delacroix, curator at Musée du Louvre, Frédérique Babin, journalist, Diane Dufour, director of le Bal, Ute Kolmann, founder and art director of West’ ival festival in Amsterdam, Chantal Nedjib, director of communication, Guillaume Piens, Art Paris Art Fair, Michel Poivert, teacher Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne and Fabien Simode, editor in chief of the art review L’oeil.
AWARD
Photo Camera Clara
www.prixcameraclara.com
