JULIE DE WAROQUIER Winner of the Emergent Artist Award, 2011 - 2012 Edition The first edition of the International Emerging Artist Award previously known as Emergent Artist Award focused on contemporary photography including all the innovative manipulations of the image. Artist’s statement and universe Art fundamentally has a social mission. It has to raise questions and to point out some issues. It has to question our society, our common lives. It has to surprise, to disturb. Even if most of the contemporary thinkers separate art and beauty, in my point of view a work of art has to be somewhat beautiful. We are faced to ugly and frightening facts every day. We are confronted to war, to disease, to death. Art can be there to remind us that there are other things on earth, such as beauty, hope and love. By the very fact that it carries all of these values, art goes against the rest of the world.
"Chimeras", the twins project. For this project, Julie de Waroquier travelled throughout France for several months to meet and photograph different set of twins in their environment. Julie had always been fascinated by twins, and not only because she has a twin brother. When she was a child she kept on reading novels about twins. In that series, Julie succeeded to make from a documentary project a contemporary and artistic interpretation of a common theme of life, twins. For her, twins are almost magic and they are like a real dream or a miracle. In her work, she managed to represent this surprising reality and shows the spectator how her imagination transcends it in a kind of symbolical dream that would glimpses from our sub-conscious. Julie de Waroquier’s work explores the mysteries of our world, as for her, everything should not be rationalized. The question behind the twins project is related to our perception of things that we can’t understand and how we can show invisible things (thoughts, feelings, the sub¬conscious) rather than visible things through photography, an art that contrarily has the function to reproduce reality. The coherence between Julie’s aesthetic and concept in the Twins Project. Julie explained that the concept came first and aesthetic followed. She knew already what she wanted to create with this project, and did her best to find the appropriate tools and techniques to make the pictures she had in mind. From a purely technical aspect, Julie only used one lens, the 50mmf1.4, with the Nikon D7000. During post¬-processings, she mostly edited the colors of her pictures to give them this surreal look, using mainly the “curves” tool. For this project, the 50mm was perfect because it gave her the wide aperture she needed to focus on the twins, with a nice blur around them. Indeed, she wanted the twins to be as if we were randomly walking and suddenly we’d see them in the middle of the street. Before entering the competition, Julie has never exhibited this series.
Dubai by Julie de Waroquier Julie de Waroquier was invited to Dubai to receive her award and these pictures were taken during her stay in March 2012.