Rachael Woodson, United States / France

Rachael Woodson is an artist born in Switzerland in 1984. She grew up in the United States and is based in Paris. After earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree in Photography at the School of Visual Arts in New York, she moved to France to study at the École nationale supérieure de la photographie in Arles and Université Paris 8. Her work has been exhibited at museums and art spaces internationally. She teaches at Université Paris 8, École nationale supérieure d’arts Paris-Cergy and Parsons Paris.

Her work explores the subjective side of photography, inviting the viewer to relate to time-based media in an intimate and visceral way. Recent projects focus on the photographic potential of literature, in particular, poetry. To do this Rachael Woodson has developed a hybrid methodology resonating practice with theory, image with text. Written and photographic narrative forms are considered in parallel, allowing for moments of “translation" between images and text and shifts between different eras. Taking a haptic approach, she works regularly with analog photography, experimenting with techniques that integrate
old and new image-making processes. Portraiture plays an essential role in her work and she often finds inspiration in figures from the history of art and literature. Elements selected from their books, journals, and correspondence become the basis for a dialogue the artist initiates with other people, an important collaborative part of the process. The vast collection of photographs the artist has been making of her family since the early 2000s is a much-revisited source from which she draws to converge with these new investigations. Her siblings, in particular, take on various roles throughout her work. A photograph can be a chameleon. In playing with that quality and recontextualizing images to reveal the theatricality inherent to the medium, the intention is to go behind the curtain of photography’s tricky relationship with memory.