Corinne Mariaud
Corinne Mariaud (b. 1964) is a French photographer who lives and works in Paris. After graduating from Duperré National School of Arts in Paris, Corinne Mariaud started working as a portrait and fashion photographer for numerous magazines (Liberation, Le Monde, Marie-Claire, Marie-France…), before turning to Fine Art photography. Her photographic series evoke, through the figure of the body, the quest for identity, the struggle of the individual to preserve singularity in a standardised world. Her work questions the image of the woman and her place in our contemporary society, the diktat of appearance, cliché about femininity and masculinity. Based in Asia for two years (2015-2017) she produced two series - Fake i Real Me and Flower Beauty Boys; which question the obsession for beauty and pressure over physical appearance among young people in Singapore, Seoul and Tokyo. Her Fake i Real Me series was part of “Human +, the future of our species” exhibition in Singapore Art Science Museum 2017 She currently works on the subject of new masculinities and gender transition.
TROPHIES
The woman is a trophy hanging on the wall. She becomes the tableau itself, the object hooked. She is prisoner of her image, victim of stereotypes. I chose to exacerbate these clichés, an overflowing mouth, an oversized brushing, apparent docility. The ideal woman is frozen, she cannot damage any more. However on some images you can feel a resistance, an imminent revolt. Trophies series evokes a fascination for beauty, but also death, as a hunting trophy, despite his peaceful appearance, evokes violence and death.
Through this work, I question my own femininity and my identity as a woman in the society.
Fake I, Real Me
Our quest for idealised beauty is seen from a new perspective in Fake i Real Me a photographic series shot in Singapore and Seoul.
Corinne Mariaud questions the importance that many young women give totheir physical appearance. This photographic series highlights the diktat of image, as well as cliché representations of femininity in contemporary society. In Singapore, young women wear coloured contact lenses with enlarged pupils to enhance their eyes. Transforming their gaze, these contact lenses are like a mask that both hides and exposes them. n Seoul, South Korea, the pursuit of perfection is pushed to the extreme. Mariaud photographed young women who place beauty among the most important things in their lives, and use any tools to magnify their physical appearance: contact lenses, makeup and plastic surgery.
The face becomes a personnel construction, to be constantly reworked, little by little until it reaches a perceived ideal of beauty.
Flower Beauty Boys
The Flower Beauty Boys series questions the extreme importance asian young men give to physical appearance, which became a criterion for social integration. Mariaud was based in Asia for a few years and traveled to Singapore, Seoul and Tokyo. She found her models through social networks. These young men want to look like the daily selfies they make, and incarnate perfect images retouched on their smartphone. By wearing makeup and using cosmetic surgery, they move away from the usual codes of masculinity and distance themselves from the diktat of society around manhood. In Japan, some claim a trend, genderless Kei.
Disorder
Disorder series features individuals who appear alone in the photographs. Imposed in an a common place setting in which they do not behave appropriately, they "escape the framework" of normality. To some extent, in many photographs, the individuals seem dead. The body remains inanimate in deserted streets, isolated, like a shell that its inhabitant has gotten rid of. Mariaud’s work thus expresses a form of solitude, where the norm is not reassuring but constrains the individual to a kind of violence towards oneself