Pauline Corto

Pauline Corto defines herself above all as an image maker. Born in 1973, in the East of France, she studied the semiology of the image at the European Institute of Cinema and Audiovisual in Nancy, before finalizing her journalism course at the CFPJ in Paris.

For a regional daily press title, she wrote true, everyday stories, illustrated with photographs. His favorite themes remain social events, stories with a strong human impact, portraits and charitable action. For three years, she ran a decoration section in the Sunday magazine of the same newspaper, where she still works as a journalist.

During Covid and following a few fallen loves, she began to “sample” her world through a compulsive sampling of snapshots. Confinement requires, at home, she begins to create portraits of objects using kitchen utensils. Timeless black and white immediately stands out in the “Household Arts Series”, which combines taste for design and graphic sensitivity. The diptychs in this series promise to be founders of a universe where vanishing lines and textures of materials compete for an aesthetic that is at once geometric, urban and poetic.

It is with this photographic style in hand that she will then approach the public space by doing her weekly runs and photographing along the streets of her hometown, Nancy and its surroundings. “Making an image of everything, making an image of here and imagination” becomes his obsession through a new project “American Pacotille”… The mythical America, dreamed of on the corner of his street, running, strolling, triggering, by assembling and pasting fragments of photos which give the illusion of being there. We come across a cowboy in sequins, laundromats with big-eyed portholes, gas stations in the shape of a “Mushroom” or even legendary cars, Mustang and Capri, on the roads of deep America captured in fact at ground level. Lorraine countryside. A whole world of illusions... “My photography is anything but proof through images. She diverges, she lies, she associates beauty and fragments. It only engages those who watch it and believe in it very strongly. »

Through iconic photography and old-fashioned atmospheres, vintage objects are revealed via a curve, a reflection, a vibration. Their functionality disappears to leave room only for their line, their silhouette, their elegance. Lacemaker of deep black and fragile white, Pauline Corto's snapshots reveal particular care for framing and lighting. In the materiality of this gallery of portraits without gaze, she ultimately only seeks to capture the immateriality of things. Their soul, even their immortality.

She is currently working on a new series paying tribute to French designer-architect Jean Prouvé.