Marine Lanier
Born in 1981
Lives and works in Dieulefit (Drome)
Marine Lanier was born in 1981 in Valence, and lives and works between Crest and Lyon. After studying geography, literature and cinema, she graduated from the École Nationale supérieure de Photographie in 2007. She is currently represented by the Jörg Brockmann Gallery (Switzerland).
Marine Lanier has shown her work in France and abroad. In 2016, Poursuite publishing house released a monograph of her work, Nos feux nous appartiennent, with a text by writer Emmanuelle Pagano. In 2021, a new monograph, Le Soleil des loups, will be released by the same publisher.
Born into a family of horticulturists and sailors, Marine Lanier centres her research around questions of ecology, clan structures, relationships and the call of adventure. Her approach is akin to that of a documentary fable or of “magical realism”.
Her work explores disreputable, inaccessible places shrouded in danger and mystery: her father’s abandoned plant nursery, a dormant volcano, the waves of a dam, the geology of a land devastated by wars and earthquakes in Armenia, a laboratory garden at the foot of a glacier on the route of Hannibal’s epic in the Alps.
Marginal characters and irrational worlds have fascinated her for several years, during which she has photographed predominantly male communities such as tree-trimmers and gardeners, two wolfchild-like brothers living self-sufficiently on an inverted relief in Ardèche, her ship captain great-grandfather’s itinerary as seen through the prism of sailors’ superstitions, smugglers and other deserters at the Italian border, and a group of prisoners devising a coded language together.
The topics of narration and metamorphosis are underlying elements in her work, often presented as the invention of individual destiny within a group’s rituals. Her visual approach bears sensory, immersive, sometimes even dreamlike qualities. She makes frequent use of the light source from an eclipse or of symbols and monochromatic hues reminiscent of the colour of dreams or wonderment, which transport us to a shift of the world’s values.