VANESSA MOSELLE

The Woman ISO 3200

Vanessa Moselle was born in 1977 in Colmar. She grew up in a Catholic family, her father was a Policeman and her mother was a Sales Manager for a jet engine manufacturer. In here early age Vanessa became passionate about the art of drawing and painting. Her parents eventually decided to hang one of her abstract paint in the living room and her mother admitted to being surprised by her daughter’s imagination. Vanessa dreamt to be admitted to the Beaux-Arts University in Paris, however, life decided differently…

At age 15 she met Vijay in high school, who will soon after become her husband and soul mate. At age 18, Vanessa gave birth to her first child. Vijay and Vanessa will together quickly after having two more children. At this point, Vanessa had to stop her studies and started to look for a job. She will work for 20 years as a clerk for a youth after school administration in Colmar (Alsace, France).

In 2010 Vanessa lost her brother David. Frustration, anger, and deep sadness, feelings started to grow in her while she realized she couldn’t find any good photos of him. Eventually, she decided to take Vijay’s argentic camera and started to shoot non-stop. “It was some sort of photo (graphic) -therapy, at the beginning all my photos were very dark and morbid” explained Vanessa.

Autodidact, Vanessa pursues her path in the world of the photography with the support and help of her husband who is himself a computer scientist and advanced photographer. Vijay remembers Vanessa’s debuts: “Vanessa was taking photos non-stop, in non-academic postures, lying on the ground or standing up on a table, the camera at arm’s length. She belongs to this new generation who decided to not follow the technic”

During one year Vanessa will slowly learn the basics and fundamentals of the photography: image framing, composition, lighting, Photoshop touch-up. Later she decided to aim her camera towards the ones she loves: her children and then her children’s friends. Then she found other models on social networks or on the street. Her portraits, in color or in black and white, noticeable by a great mastering of the image framing and the light, plotted in “disenchanting” sets (abandoned factories, decrepit apartments) pleased people and provided her a local fame.

In 2011 she decided, along with Vijay, to start wedding photography. Together they’ve decided to go against the traditional photos such event is typically requesting or arousing. No more lined-up family and obsolete romantic frozen poses, they are betting spontaneity. Their photos taken on the spot are inspired by the photojournalist. Staging fancy or magical atmosphere scenes by dressing the groom and the 1/2 bride with swords, boots or Napoleonian hats is something that pleases and become popular very quickly. This resulted in a huge success and requests to cover weddings started to come from all over France. In 2015 Vanessa decided to leave her clerk position and devote 100% of her time to her photographer carrier, which eventually rewarded her by winning the first place in one of the categories of the Estée Lauder Pink Ribbon Photo Award contest. Since then she has collaborated with multiple brands such as “Cartier”, “Manor”, “William L”, “Springsioux”, “Les Rhabilleurs”, and has also covered the famous French rock festival “Les Eurockéennes”.

In parallel, Vanessa is developing a series of around 50 artistic photos where eclectic universes are colliding. In her series “Burton”, which is a tribute to Tim Burton, we can find an Alice who escaped from a land rather worrisome than wonderful, stuck in a tunnel; or a disturbing girl with a rabbit mask.

She also draws her inspiration from the cold and worrisome Alfred Hitchcock or Gus Van Sant’s universes while she still devotes a cult to Dali’s surrealism and Chaplin’s malicious humor. Vanessa pleases herself in parallel, imaginary, poetic and aesthetic worlds, which are flirting with our primal anxieties: fear of the unknown, abandonment anxiety, or even fear of death. For that last theme, Vanessa is approaching it in a creative way: she is photographing her models in a set that represents their own representation or perception of death.

Most of the time her photos are staging women. Fatal beauties, purely aesthetic, accomplice sisters, fairy floating in time and space, a young woman on roller skates perched on an airport table, or models with exaggerated features to denounce the Photoshop touch-up Diktat.

Vanessa refuses to lock herself in one single thematic. She is claiming out loud the great diversity of her subjects, refusing to be identified under one label only. Her pictures do not have title to allow free interpretation. Nevertheless, each picture is the result of a well thought artistic process, an idea to defend or of an emotional wave from this sensitive photographer, a woman as sensible as an ISO 3200 argentic camera photographic film which was the highest sensitivity of the old black and white photographic films.