Dolorès Marat

Dolorès Marat’s universe is a photographic enigma, a poetic and unsettling tale. Trees start to move, cinema doors smile at us, a crocodile woman takes notes, it rains birds while a stingray observes us through the aquarium glass. From the metro to the gates of the Middle East, where on earth is Dolorès Marat taking us? What secret is she whispering to us?

This monograph, published on the occasion of the Prix Robert Delpire 2023, invites us to explore the photographer’s intangible, bewitching work, like the ghostly silhouettes she captures in rare flashes of light. Dolorès Marat likes to photograph in the blue hour, at dusk or dawn, in dimly lit, vaporous atmospheres conducive to the marvellous. She embraces this motion blur, and her proximity to painting is reinforced by her choice of the Fresson charcoal print. Hallucinatory images, fleeting visions: everything is suggested, allowing viewers to invent their own stories.

As Magali Jauffret points out in her beautiful text: “Dolorès doesn’t stage her work, she doesn’t cheat with what she sees. She doesn’t crop, retouch or post-produce. She only takes one photo, and it’s the right one. She makes the instantaneous. At once a cult photographer and a popular artist, Dolores Marat is unclassifiable.