Welcome to my website!
For the moment, my site only exists in French. In anticipation of an updated bilingual version, I've created this page in English. It includes my biography, statement, CV, and my English portfolio, as well as a few pages from the book I've just written (Dec. 2024) on the occasion of the first exhibition in the United States of my project A War On Us. You can also download the English-language portfolio of the project (full resolution / low resolution).
Since 2019, Praud has been developing a long-term project in the USA entitled A war on us. In 2022, she was invited by Le Carré d’Art photographic center in France to develop a body of work about mental health as part of a residency at a psychiatric hospital. This work, entitled "Comme une branche de laquelle un oiseau s’est envolé", was published in 2023 by Sur la crête. Her work, which weaves images and texts, questions the way in which political and social systems affect the individuals who inhabit them. Praud is interested in the effects produced by power dynamics, and questions notions of responsibility and guilt.
Since 2016, she has been running workshops and teaching photography. Finally, in 2018, she created L’œil parlant, a non-profit aiming to implement photographic projects addressed at vulnerable audiences, in an empowering participatory approach. Praud was born in 1979, lives and works in France and abroad.
My work questions the way in which political and social systems affect the individuals who inhabit them. It looks at what power relations produce and questions notions of responsibility and guilt. Through the aesthetics of portraiture in particular, he seeks to recompose communities by juxtaposing bodies in serial work. My work aims to rehabilitate bodies that are and have historically been cast outside the norm. It seeks to produce images and narratives capable of creating a sense of community.
My photographic practice, although documentary, is also personal. It's been said that for a human being to function optimally, his conscious and subconscious parts must interact, naturally. In this way, I hypothesize that my practice is, from a certain point of view, a process of resilience; I'm probably trying to understand the world better, to better find my place in it.
On several occasions, I've chosen to work in long immersion (France, United States). I'm looking for the porosity of worlds and the confrontation of cultures, which destabilizes and confronts me; I consider my projects, above all, to be human adventures. In fact, it was in the company of my fellow photographers in the bellavieza collective that I discovered a whole range of American photography, which continues to inspire me today in the creation of my series (Jim Goldberg, Lise Sarfati, Taryn Simon, Alec Soth).
Perhaps photography isn't talkative enough for me. Or perhaps it's simply my attraction to writing that leads me to want to work on the aesthetic and narrative relationship between words and images. This research, although still in its infancy, is essential for me.
Pages from the book A War On Us published in december 2024