Corinne Mercadier

The French photographer Corinne Mercadier stages her dreams, and interweaves childhood experiences and suggestive memories into her works. The images often comprise wondrous landscapes bordering on the abstract, dramatic compositions, enigmatic characters and frozen movements, as if time stood still. Over the past fifteen years she has exhibited extensively at major photo galleries and museums in, among others, Paris, Madrid, Barcelona and New York.

surrealism provided her with an opportunity to create a world of her own

For many years Corinne Mercadier worked with Polaroid film and was dependent on the film’s shortcomings in order to visualise her dreams. It was these pictures that provided her breakthrough. Mercadier discovered early that surrealism provided her with an opportunity to create a world of her own. She explores our relationship to the world around us and how it affects us. She develops her scenes meticulously, producing costumes and making detailed sketches. At the same time she allows for accidental occurrences during shooting. By throwing objects into the pictorial space she freezes movements and creates new, unexpected forms that accentuate the mysteriousness of the images. Sometimes it changes the meaning of the content of an image. Mercadier describes her creative work as a spiral, an eternal return to somewhere else, a new place, with new expressions, tools, models and projects.

Born in 1955, Corinne Mercadier lives and works in Paris. As a young woman she studied art and art history, receiving an Aggregation of Fine Arts and a Bachelor of Art History form the University of Provence. Since 1986 Mercadier has exhibited regularly at galleries in Paris and New York, and has participated in several major photography festivals in the United States, France and Spain.