The Camera Clara Prize was awarded to Baptiste Rabichon. He will exhibit until June 30 at the Frank Horvat Studio.
In her presentation, Audrey Bazin writes:
The English philosopher Bernard Williams declared that he could not define the truth, but distinguished two cardinal virtues, accuracy and sincerity, which allowed us to get close to it.
When one day Baptiste Rabichon fell over on his bed, a childhood memory came back, that of daydreaming while exploring with the eyes those strange empty palaces that are the ceilings. As Marguerite Pilven notes in her text on the series Mother’s Rooms – Camera Clara Prize 2022, «By materializing a childhood vision, (…) Baptiste Rabichon makes a sensitive return to the place of the original image, not yet corrected by the filter of mediations. It is precisely there – the place of the original image, that he unites accuracy and sincerity. While the objectivity of photography is constantly questioned, photography is for Baptiste Rabichon a trigger for a revived truth, and it doesn’t matter if it is based on a memory, a sensation that is necessarily subjective. In his previous series, Baptiste Rabichon mixed techniques, those of the photographer and the visual artist, since «photography alone cannot capture the complexity of a moment, the entirety of a situation; often revealing only a lack, that of a time seized and forever gone. In Mother’s Rooms, on the contrary, his use of the large format camera returns to the essence of the image: the point of view. Artifice and discourse are discarded to make room for the grace of the simplicity of this single point of view. Here, the beauty of Baptiste Rabichon’s truth is so simple that it operates like an alchemy, and we are all shaken.
Audrey Bazin
Exhibition until June 30, 2023
Studio Frank Horvat
5 Rue de l’Ancienne Mairie
92100 Boulogne-Billancourt, France
www.studiofrankhorvat.com
