Images picked out of the air like butterflies… Caty Jan dallies with death: one minute you’re there and the next minute you’ve gone, like nothing ever happened. What does it mean to die? A fluttering of wings and that’s it.
Caty Jan shoots in a hurry… as if trying to hold on to life? Through her artistic approach, she questions two of life’s milestones – coming into the world and leaving it, offering up visual responses that are almost stellar. Caught between tension and fragility, barely visible signs of vitality surge up in the images: on a watch face, a fragment of time that passes and suddenly freezes; a show of contemplation narrowly discerned; a man slamming the door in the face of death; a flurry taking flight up towards uncertain skies.
Like will-o’-the-wisps, these images are apparitions, pulsations. Caty takes a deep breath to bring life to the scene and embody that final day.
Caty Jan
She was born in 1966 in Brest.
Caty Jan’s work is straight to the point. It deals with the essential – with life and death, and it doesn’t spare us. It is raw and violent, yet still graceful. It never lets go of our hand but instead takes us on board. Caty was abruptly forced to put an end to her photography a few years ago after a stroke, but her work is still there, still haunting us.
1989 She moved to Paris and made her first photographs backstage at the Crazy Horse.
1991 She begins a series on birth in several Parisian maternity and after in Cuban hospitals. Creation of Tendance Floue.
1996 Exhibition of « Télé-visions » at Espace Belleville, Paris. Exhibition of « Cabaret cubain » at Fenêtre sur cour, Paris.
1998 She makes a series about the universe in a psychiatric hospital room, then the “Ad Vitam æternam” series, work on the burial chambers.
2001 Exhibition of « Cuba » at chapelle Saint-Joseph de Lesneven.
2003 She makes a final photographic journey, “National Zero” in France and Spain and stopped photography.
