Sophie Ristelhueber

Beyrouth, Cité sportive, 1984
tirage noir et blanc et papier baryté
50 x 60 cm
unique

Born in 1949 in Paris, Sophie Ristelhueber was initially a student of literature at the Sorbonne in the early 1970s. After working in publishing and the press, she left the world of writing for that of the image. In 1980, she directed the film San Clemente with Raymond Depardon, which was released in 1982. That same year, she moved to Beirut during a lull in the civil war and came back with the black and white photographs for her first book, Beirut, released in 1984 and quickly noted for its singular relationship to news reporting. If the diptychs of Vulaines (1989) came close to the autobiography and childhood memories, Done (1992) returns to the question of war and its representations in the world today. In October 1991, shortly after the fighting ended the first Gulf War, Sophie Ristelhueber travels and flies over the desert of Kuwait, where she notes down the petrified or blackened signs of destruction. She cautioned seventy-one views in his book in paperback. These traces of death in the desert area make think about the scars on the skin, such as those she photographs in a Paris hospital, meeting in the series EveryOne (1994). This conception of photography, detached, refusing any dramatic effect like any story, is at work again in 2005 in WB, the original West Bank border area between the West Bank and Israel. In the winter of 2003-2004, she observed here ditches, piles of stones and debris that cut roads and paths between the two areas. Eleven Blowup (2006) brings together, equally soberly, images of craters, which are to believe geological accidents rather than clues of attacks and bombings. This work has been the subject of numerous exhibitions and publications as they are created.