Interview with Sophie Ristelhueber.
Why do we become artists? And how? To what extent are we artists? Prompted by Catherine Grenier's direct questions, Sophie Ristelhueber retraces the atypical journey of an artist who was never destined for this late, yet fulfilled destiny. Clear-eyed and sincere, her testimony offers a compelling introduction to contemporary art, its aims and its stakes. She evokes the drive of an "inner necessity" that leads her into war-torn landscapes, keeping pace with conflicts and wounds, in search of traces and scars.
Adjunct Director of the Musée national d'art moderne, Centre Pompidou, until 2014, Catherine Grenier is the Director of the Giacometti Foundation. An art historian, she is the author of numerous publications and texts about contemporary art.
Sophie Ristelhueber (born 1949 in Paris) is one of the great figures of art
photography today. Since her foundational work on the city of
Beirut
destroyed in the
war at the beginning of the 1980s, she has followed a
demanding path that tests the conditions in which the real is seen. She
has developed an engaged reflection on territory and its history through
a singular approach to
landscape, which is conceived as a space that
carries the traces of the major upheavals of human activity and memory
(historical wars, recent conflicts, civil wars, earthquakes), questioning,
like an archeologist, the marks left by man on the surface, leaving the
stigmata of history visible. Implying a complete personal engagement
and a real experience of the land, Ristelhueber's work borrows from
journalism its tools (photography) and one of its major themes (war), but
bends them to the processes of art: her oeuvre is not built around a
documentary project to represent, but, starting from an aesthetic
project, to interrogate the notion of trace, on the body and on the
place.
Sophie Ristelhueber was awarded the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2010 and the Hasselblad Prize 2025.
