Camille Vivier and the Lomo'Instant Square

Camille Vivier is a French photographer represented by Iconoclast image and the Galerie Für Moderne Fotografie Berlin. In 1997, she won the photography award of the 12th International Fashion and Photography Festival of Hyères (Festival International de Mode et de Photographie de Hyères) and in 2002 the Villa Médicis 's scholarship. In 2016, she went back to the Villa Noailles in Hyères for a photographic commission and she did a work about adolescence during her residency : "Les Hyèroglyphes, Îles d’Or". Camille Vivier shoots digital, analogue and instant photography. She develops her personal research and also takes commissioned photos for fashion. She regularly collaborates with magazines like I-D, Dazed & Confused, Another.

In Camille Vivier's universe, poetry and fetishism merge with rock and new wave. In her personal work and in her commissioned work, she puts in tension the corporal and the sculptural. We gave her our newest instant camera, the Lomo'Instant Square with which she continued to explore her theme of preference. Inspired by Surrealism and retro style, Camille took pictures of her legs in multiple exposures: she multiplies herself on the photos, a metamorphosis which is reminiscent of The Doll by Hans Bellmer. While experimenting with the Lomo'Instant Square, Camille Vivier also seems to have found a Paris from another time in which flippers, meery-go-rouds and the urbanism of the 19th district of the city interweave. We talked about theses photos and about the Lomo'Instant Square with Camille...

Hello Camille, can you introduce yourself to our readers?

I'm a photographer and I live in Paris. I share my time between my personal work and fashion.

How did your interest with photography start? What place does it occupy in your life?

I started photography at the end of high-school when I was studying art. After, I did an internship at Purple Magazine (at the end of the 90's) and photography really imposed itself to me as the more discrete and sensible medium, the more adequate. Photography is my whole life, as an artistic practice and as a trace of the everyday, I really love images and I need to make some.

What are your sources of inspiration?

The works of photographers I like, painting, movies, sculpture and more and more architecture.
But, what I particularly like is people that I want to photograph because I find them inspiring, singular. Places I found poetic. Universes in which we can feel a sense of unsettling strangeness and a form of intangible beauty. And also, magic, music, objects, women, eroticism.

Tell us a bit about the pictures you took with the Lomo'Instant Square

I tried different things because I wanted to appropriate the camera so I worked on different series in an experimental way. I first photographed candles, I've been working with these voodoo candles for a while now, and I tried multiple exposures to associate them in order to emphasize their esoteric aspect, something a bit primitive.

Then I photographed old flippers, like if they were pop art paintings. I think it works well with the square format of the Lomo'Instant Square. Afterwards, I took pictures of my feet and legs in a quite obsessive way. The photos reflect some kind of fetishism and they also remind of a kind of retro advertising photography style. Using the multiple exposure mode, I had fun in multiplying myself as if it was a surrealist dream, a bit perverse.

What do you like about instant photography?

It's magical!

What were your first impressions of the Lomo'Instant Square?

I loved to work with the Lomo'Instant Square : for its immediacy, its format, its colors and the camera is really pretty.

What would you recommend using the Lomo'Instant Square for?

It's very subjective, potentially on every occasions but I found interesting to photograph subjects with vivid colors and to use multiple exposure on a graphical subjects.

What are your upcoming projects?

I am working on an exhibition project, a book and a series of photographs in Georgia.

Thank you Camille, we look forward to seeing your future projects.
For more information, you can visit Camille's website, her instagram or her tumblr.

written by florinegarcin on 2018-02-03 #people