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Created in 2012, Camera Clara Photo Award is dedicated to photographers using large format camera. It rewards an unpublished work created by an artist, presented as a series or other coherent and comprehensive photographic set. The work will be assessed on its coherence, as a form as well as a content.
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Delphine Balley
Prize winner 2019
Delphine Balley was born in 1974. She lives and works in the Drôme region of France. After several series mixing fiction and reality, news and family history (11, Henrietta Street, l'Album de famille), after dissecting ancestral, curative, Marian or funerary rites, after showing the beliefs and practices that structured societies in the past, Delphine Balley's new series focuses on religious or sectarian beliefs, and more precisely on the way images help to build belief. How can we show something that doesn't exist, and how can we stage it? A mise en abyme of her work as a photographer, she analyzes and shows the construction of the image, the mechanisms of staging and organizing belief, based on the most spectacular beliefs, and in particular parallel religious groups.
In its history, photography (and later the cinematograph) extends the immersive devices that preceded it (diorama, panorama, illusion shows). It is therefore on the side of artifice and trickery “to make us believe”. The image, and the conditions under which it is produced and appears, maintain an ambiguous relationship between visibility, reality and truth.
In her new series, Delphine Balley reflects on the making of images and their systems of appearance, through different optical and recording devices.
The starting point for her reflection is a photograph long stored in her computer, rediscovered a few months ago: La salle du temple de l'organisation de L'Ordre du temple solaire. For her, this image “makes resistance”. Delphine Balley understands that this totally artificial place is organized and staged “to make people believe”: to believe in the invisible.
A strong relationship between staging and the organization of beliefs has always existed, but what's disturbing about parallel religious groups is that the artifice is barely disguised. Faith is so strong that we accept that the staging may be marred by clumsiness: strange relationships of scale, materials used, apparent tricks... It's around all these visual constructions that Delphine Balley wanted to work. Image, representation and appearance are at the root of all belief. We organize reality for the spectators that we are, in an attempt to apprehend it as closely as possible.
To recreate these images, these settings, Delphine Balley called on the means used in the first forms of shows: simple materials, cardboard, wood, plaster... It is thus by an assumed staging largely evoking artifice that she treated the subject.