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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 It rewards an unpublished work created by an artist, presented as a series or other coherent and comprehensive photographic set.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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Joël Denot
Special mention 2013
Joël Denot is a photographer, and always has been. Unlike photography, which seeks to represent reality, his work focuses on the essential elements of photography: light, color and the relationship with time. Entirely shot on location, Joël Denot's work reveals a purely photographic gesture, with no laboratory work.
In all his works, we could say that there is a subject, an image, a body. Yet, at first glance, his work does not seem “photographic”; rather, it invokes painting, even painting that might be described as abstract, or geometric. We have the feeling we're looking at paintings. The artist's body, present in most of the works, seems drowned in color.
Because what she reveals is a play of colored or luminous forms that evoke nothing precise, other than superimposed surfaces and monochrome assemblages.
Because its dimensions refer to pictorial formats rather than the usual photographic formats (even if these formats can today be highly variable, oscillating between the postcard and the large-scale painting). JOËL DENOT is one of those artists who reacts against the multiplication of images, and, in his field, against a photography that is merely a “recording of the world”. His photos are made in camera, on photographic paper.
For him, photography is first and foremost what it originally was: an unveiling by light, an apparition. The first photographic images, the daguerreotypes, were certainly images of reality, but they were above all images of light, fleeting and ghostly.
Joël Denot was born in Rennes in 1961. He lives and works in Japan. He has been exhibiting his work in France and abroad since the late 1990s.
joeldenot.blogspot.fr