As the primary main survey of her work opens in Paris, Camille Vivier discusses her singular profession in artwork and trend pictures
A white horse with a fiery auburn mane stands towards a deep purple backdrop, a white chiffon veil cascading throughout its again. A lady poses inside a tall, spiral steel sculpture, her athletic type and buffed pores and skin mirroring the art work’s curvature and glow. A tree, captured in black and white, appears to have sprouted a feminine type – again, neck, arms, plump buttocks, shapely thighs and all. This is the universe of the French photographer Camille Vivier. Existing on the intersection of positive artwork and trend pictures (the important thing sides of her apply), it’s a world the place animals and objects regularly seem human, whereas people could resemble structure, sculpture or types present in nature, or – simply as probably – characters in a movie.
Dreamlike, theatrical, irreverent and attractive, Vivier’s work abounds with creative, cultural and cinematic references. Frequently, these evocations are delicate and layered: a touch of David Lynch, a whisper of Alfred Hitchcock, a sly nod to Cindy Sherman, comedian books or Carlo Mollino. Occasionally, they’re instantly obvious: her putting, statuesque depictions of girls bodybuilders and daring, superbly staged nonetheless lifes, as an example, pay direct homage to Robert Mapplethorpe.
It was this specific connection that Paris’ Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP) was eager to discover when its staff first approached Vivier about internet hosting an exhibition of her work. “They originally wanted to do a cross-exhibition between Mapplethorpe and me, which I thought was a great idea, very challenging,” Vivier says over the telephone from her residence in Paris. “Unfortunately, it was too complicated to get the works from the Mapplethorpe Foundation, but they still wanted me to do a show.”
Instead, the newly opened exhibition – titled merely Camille Vivier and spanning a whole flooring of the pictures museum – is devoted fully to Vivier’s esoteric oeuvre. “It’s a sort of retrospective, but not really because I’m not that old,” the photographer laughs. “More a selection of different works from among my body of work, looking at the key subjects and patterns like the body or anthropomorphic shapes, shape in general … ”
The result’s what the museum phrases a “thematic journey” throughout Vivier’s 25-year profession bringing collectively round ten collection and nearly 100 works, from gelatin silver and digital prints to Polaroids, to showcase her distinct visible vernacular. Often she works in a studio setting, constructing units or backdrops, experimenting with compelling color mixtures and utilizing gentle to sculpt quantity – like a director and DoP rolled into one. “My references stem from this studio approach, not in a nostalgic way but in a way that’s cinematic, or crafted,” she explains.
Plenty of the works included within the present reveal the evolution of this technique. There’s the aforementioned horse – a part of Vivier’s 2002 collection Horses, whereby particular person animals are captured towards a contextless background, showing nearly as mythic symbols. There’s Teatro Colla (2014), the photographer’s playful “portraits” of puppets designed within the Nineteen Thirties by Luigi Veronesi, a pioneer of Italian abstraction. While the long-running venture Monument (2002–2022) sees Vivier centre on anthropomorphic candles utilized in Afro-Brazilian rituals, which she captures towards vibrant studio backdrops. In each occasion, formal magnificence is offset towards an air of secrecy or narrative stress, directly alluring and disquieting.
Perhaps one of the best encapsulation of this duality will be present in Vivier’s collection HR Giger (2021–2022), titled after – and photographed within the residence and studio of – the late, nice Swiss artist chargeable for dreaming up each the set design and the Xenomorph creature for Ridley Scott’s cult sci-fi horror Alien. “It’s a huge body of work,” Vivier says, “so for me it was important to have this in there – there’s a room dedicated to it.” In Vivier’s pictures, Giger’s fantastical, and regularly feminine biomechanical creations come nose to nose with Vivier’s feminine fashions, who declare the setting as their very own in a bizarre merging of metals, solid artificial supplies and human flesh. Cronenberg, eat your coronary heart out.
When it involves photographing the human type, Vivier is – once more – involved in staging, within the porous nature of identification, within the stress between masculinity and femininity that exists inside us all. (Her three collection focussing on completely different feminine bodybuilders captured in studio settings are an ideal instance of this). This fascination is a permanent one – in her late teenagers, Vivier utilized to the Sorbonne with the goal of studying underneath the French physique artist Michel Journiac, who within the Seventies had photographed himself within the guise of assorted feminine archetypes. “He died the summer before I started there,” she remembers, “so that was really demotivating for me.”
Three months into her first time period, nevertheless, she met the staff behind Purple Magazine and commenced working there as a substitute, kickstarting her ongoing profession in trend pictures (though she would later return to artwork faculty to finish her research). The world of trend imagery proved the best platform for Vivier’s cinematic eye – “even though at the time fashion photography was ‘anti-fashion’: Wolfgang Tillmans, Juergen Teller, Anders Edström” – and an important affect on her private output. “I enjoyed working with a team,” she remembers, “and it was quite close to what I liked stylistically – this idea of artifice, of working with makeup, the glamour … I guess the way I photograph [personal projects] is probably the same as the way I capture a fashion image, except that it’s not about [showcasing] the clothes.”
Reflecting again on her spectacular profession as far as the primary main survey of her work opens, Vivier notices a couple of modifications: “I sense a sort of naivety in my photographs from 20 or 25 years ago, and I am less romantic now. Although of course I’m still romantic,” she laughs. “And I think I have more fun now, more freedom.” What is most evident, nevertheless – from an exterior perspective, at the least – is that very similar to her creative heroes earlier than her, Vivier has succeeded in cultivating a mode that’s, for all its synthesis of references, unequivocally her personal.
Camille Vivier is at La Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris till 13 September 2026