Jeanne Ricoeur's Carte Blanche

Jeanne Ricœur is a graduate of the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, a doctoral candidate in Visual Arts at the University of Lille, and a member of the CEAC since 2021.

"My photographic work is part of a flow of thoughts and images. Literature plays an essential role in this.  For years, I have been building a body of photographic work that allows me to decontextualize the images I produce for my future montages. This body of work includes black-and-white and color photographs—both film and digital—as well as family archives, film stills, anonymous photographs, and press photographs, organized by light source or by theme. 

They all feed off one another, combine, interact, and forge new connections with one another in what I call “photographic phrasing". I borrow this expression from Peter Szendy, who quotes Walter Murch: “We blink to phrase what we see; without this punctuating phrasing, there would be no gaze.” The punctuating eyelids are already a form of editing within the gaze itself; if this editing did not exist, we would not be able to look or see.”

The expression in the gaze is at the heart of my photographic montages and resonates with certain literary works. It allows for discontinuity, deviation, what lies off-screen, intermittency, suspense, withdrawal, reserve, and darkness: an imaginary world in and of itself. Much like a cinematic montage, I develop rhythms by listening to absence and compose with images that do not exist, without trying to fill in the gaps."

Jeanne Ricœur