With 30 years of career and 45 photographic series exhibited worldwide, photographer and visual artist Valérie Belin has undeniably established herself as one of the leading figures in contemporary photography. When one delves into her work, a sense of unease emerges. Is it a disturbance of identity, of the image, or of reality? It's hard to tell. However, behind this unease, an eerie beauty always stirs. "My work consists of exaggerating what happens on the surface of things. And sometimes, it's when you get very close that you realize everything is false. What I wanted to show is the lie of beauty. There is a form of alienation in all the representations of women and men that I have made up to this day."
And after photographing beauty for so long, Valérie Belin has developed her own idea about it: "Beauty is also danger, the embodiment of a certain stereotype. I think we all need role models to shape ourselves, but an excess of role models can tip our identity into something destructive. Today, the dictatorship of images could also be a definition of beauty."