L'exposition « Camille Vivier » à la MEP

Maison Européenne de la Photographie

From June 10 to September 13, 2026, the MEP presents the first retrospective devoted to the French artist Camille Vivier, a key figure in contemporary photography. Through a body of work in which bodies, sculptural forms and unsettling presences engage in dialogue, a universe both sensual and enigmatic unfolds, traversed by multiple references and unexpected visual echoes. Camille Vivier's female figures fascinate as much as they unsettle, asserting the full power and complexity of their identities. For more than twenty-five years, Camille Vivier (1977, France) has developed a practice situated at the crossroads of auteur photography and fashion photography. Her work, centered on the body and still life, engages in dialogue with commissions carried out for major magazines. From these two facets emerges a singular visual language, in which sensuality, mystery and poetry intertwine to question the relationship between the living and the inanimate. At the heart of her practice, the representation of women, and more particularly the nude, unfolds by drawing on numerous cultural references. Fascinated by powerful female figures from the fine arts, pop culture and underground scenes, she also draws on literature, comic books and early Hollywood icons. Her models assert their presence with force. The exceptional bodies of bodybuilders – Sophie, Tjiki, Deborah – constitute a privileged field of exploration. Through them, the artist engages in a reflection on the plurality of femininities, in which the construction of the body and that of identity resonate with the work of sculpture. In enigmatic staged compositions, these figures engage in dialogue with anthropomorphic objects chosen as much for their aesthetic as for their symbolic charge: monumental sculptures in public space, votive candles, modernist puppets or the biomechanical sets designed by H.R. Giger for Alien (1979) by Ridley Scott. Photography becomes the site of unprecedented juxtapositions, where a sometimes disquieting tension settles in between human bodies and fashioned bodies, between matter and flesh, between that which breathes and that which retains its form. The exhibition traces the entirety of Camille Vivier's artistic career through a thematic journey bringing together some ten series and nearly a hundred works: gelatin silver and digital prints, Polaroids, as well as works conceived specially for the exhibition, some of which play with scale and modes of display.

Source: Paris Open Data ↗