FR ENG
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 It rewards an unpublished work created by an artist, presented as a series or other coherent and comprehensive photographic set.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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Laura Henno
Special mention 2018
Slab City looks like a post-apocalyptic no-man's-land isolated in the desert, on the edge of the two largest U.S. military training bases today. For over 50 years, this place has been home to those left behind, those who wish to disappear from society. The surreal vision of the encampment is doubled by the sound of explosions and the constant overflight of fighter jets, making Slab City a place where utopia collides with violence. The camp reveals the fractures of American society, which I wish to explore through the life paths of its residents, but also through the interactions they have with the local population of neighboring towns.
“... In my photographic research, I aim to avoid the misery and pathos inherent in this type of situation, and to capture moments of grace and poetry in this fragility. My images envelop my models in a gentleness and modesty that reveal how much attention I pay to their situation.
Whatever the subjects I deal with, I try to get as close as possible to the people I want to represent, taking the time to get to know them and establish a climate of trust. During an initial two-month stay, I immersed myself completely in Slab City. I lived in a caravan equipped with solar panels and a water supply for self-sufficiency: the Ideal Trailer. By setting up my own camp, I wanted to get to grips with the experience of living in the desert, to better understand the impact of being cut off from the rest of the world.
Laura Henno initially trained as a photographer, before taking up cinema at Le Fresnoy. For several years now, Laura Henno has based her photographic and filmic approach on the challenges of clandestine migration, whether to the Comoros, the United States, Reunion Island or Calais. With documentary ambition, she reinvests reality with the potential for fiction and narrative. The resulting images provoke confusion and draw on both pictorial and cinematographic codes.
She won the Prix Découverte at the Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie d'Arles in 2007.