This week's featured artists, Chiara Benzi and Yann Delord, present two distinct yet compelling approaches to contemporary photography. While Italian artist Chiara Benzi invites viewers into a strange and ambiguous world where human and nature merge, French photographer Yann Delord, known as "Le Flâneur photographe" (The Photographer Wanderer), offers intimate glimpses from his travels around the globe.
Chiara Benzi's work is characterized by profound dichotomy and ambiguity. A graduate of the Centro Sperimentale di Fotografia Adams in Rome, the Italian artist has gained recognition as a "FRESH EYES talent" by GUP Magazine and was selected as one of the "New Talents 2021" by the Photographic Exploration Project. Her fascinating body of work, which combines photography with retouched archival materials, creates a universe that is simultaneously disturbing and attractive, revealing viewers' own ambivalences.
Benzi's images are particularly tactile, revealing bodies under tension or constraint, piercing reptilian eyes, and insects with repulsive textures. Yet it's impossible to look away, as the gaze becomes captivated by the dangerous and mesmerizing atmosphere of her photographs. This is precisely the effect the artist seems to seek. Through her work, she explores "the complex relationship between pain and pleasure, softness and hardness, desire and fear, attraction and repulsion," reproducing this same duality within viewers.
This dual character is evident in her series "Endure," where human and beast merge. In this work, she questions the connections between humans and their environment and examines the endurance of the body, which she transposes within nature. The series reveals a woman transforming into a plant, an animal, or returning to earth. Bringing a fantasy to life, Chiara Benzi delivers "the most lustful, disgusting, and vulnerable part of [herself]." This particularly intimate project relies on the double meanings that permeate it to create bridges between "the personal and the collective, introspection and connection."
It is through the power of imagination, stimulated by this equivocal aspect, that the artist manages to connect living beings, the public and her work, the familiar and the strange. Her photography challenges conventional boundaries between human and nature, creating disturbing yet beautiful compositions that force viewers to confront their own relationship with the natural world.
Yann Delord embodies a completely different photographic philosophy. Known as "Le Flâneur photographe," his work is deeply influenced by Charles Baudelaire's words from "The Painter of Modern Life": "For the perfect wanderer, for the passionate observer, it is an immense joy to take up residence in multiplicity, in the undulating, in movement, in the fugitive and the infinite." This poem accompanies each of Delord's steps and inhabits each of his images.
Born from his numerous journeys, Delord's photographs testify to the importance of walking in his life and artistic practice. His first series, created in the 1970s, unfold like small symbolic narratives. When he acquired a reflex camera, his work took a turn: seized by passion for travel photography, he wanted to make it his profession. While he ultimately became a tour organizer for thirty years, he eventually returned to the road with his digital camera in 2015.
The artist travels through cities and countries, from Niger to Denmark, passing through the United States. The latter is the subject of a project titled "The Lost Dream, America," launched in 2017 during Donald Trump's first election and spanning several years. His photographs translate both the uncertain times that the USA was experiencing and the festive and daily life that continues to unfold there.
In each of his destinations, Yann Delord seeks to fully experience the place and light, and to capture what he calls "the decisive moment," that instant "where the subject meets the image." Searching for the meaning residing in all things, he travels the world without ever managing to grasp it. Perhaps he cannot and should not be able to. "I wander in photography, I take pleasure in getting lost, in wandering in Baudelaire's sense," he concludes.
Delord's "The Lost Dream, America" project captures a nation in transition, documenting both political tensions and everyday American life. His images include young people sleeping at festivals in their party clothes, "Stop Trump" graffiti on a tarp in a desert space, residents walking their dogs by the river, a person in a flashy colored coat watching cyclists on the horizon, and a police officer standing in front of Victoria's Secret advertising posters. These photographs create a complex portrait of America during a pivotal moment in its history.
Both artists, despite their different approaches, share a commitment to exploring the deeper meanings within their subjects. Benzi's surreal and often disturbing imagery forces viewers to confront uncomfortable truths about human nature and our relationship with the natural world. Her work challenges traditional boundaries between human and animal, between beauty and repulsion, creating a visual language that speaks to our most primal instincts and fears.
Delord's documentary approach, meanwhile, captures the poetry of everyday life and the complexity of modern society. His wandering philosophy allows him to discover unexpected moments of beauty and meaning in ordinary situations, whether in the American landscape or in the streets of distant cities. His work serves as a meditation on travel, observation, and the art of seeing.
Together, these two artists represent different facets of contemporary photography's power to explore human experience. Benzi's introspective and psychologically complex work contrasts beautifully with Delord's outward-looking, travel-inspired documentation. Both remind us that photography remains one of our most powerful tools for understanding ourselves and the world around us, whether through the lens of surreal transformation or the quiet observation of daily life.
