2018 Prix Virginia International Prize for Women, Jury's Selection
Galerie Vevais
École d'arts plastiques de Poitiers et Châtellerault, France
When it comes to finding the source, you can say that the oeuvre of Severine Lenhard is born since childhood, in the intuition that, what the photographer reveals is not necessarily at the far end of the world. Born in Toulouse in 1975, she did not wait long before borrowing from her mother’s camera this magic of photography, which writes down in a different way the life that we transit. It was certainly there, and later, when she haunted concerts of alternative music, the camera around the neck, or still, as young mother, when her two children imposed themselves on her vision, that she learned what Jock Sturges calls Severine Lenhard’s lesson. This manner to always be there, in the centre of life, living-photographing, obliterating the objective from her objects’ conscience. The American photographer, especially amazed by her capacity “to squeeze childhood between the pages of her art”, talks about what she teaches us: “Severine Lenhard’s work is thus a lesson about the value of disappearance caused by considerate obsession for her objects. Her pictures find their poetry in the tiniest of all things, the ephemeral details of body and habits, banal miracles.”
From the courses in fine arts that she attended tenaciously, to her arrival in 2013 in the team of the Galerie Vevais which she joins at the invitation of J. Sturges, the encounters she had, along the way, with Claudine Doury, Claude Pauquet, David Falco, Jock Sturges, then Frank Horvat, Severine Lenhard lays out a path off the beaten track, knocks on all the doors of hidden secrets. The door of childhood first, behind its clarity, behind its innocence to observe its agitation and depict its disturbance, to hold it back as best as she can; the door of a nature which struggles to disclose its constant agony and whom the photographer interrogates from her militant eye. Frank Horvat, photographer and prominent collector of photos, while asking her a few of her negatives, would say: “certain of your photos are at the same time minimalist and miraculous, and they will help my collection say what I like to make it say.” This is what you can keep in mind about Severine Lenhard. She knocks, enters on tiptoe and behind her, oftentimes, we understand.
For 5 years, she has started work on the recomposed portrait from old identity photos.
