Karine Laval

Heterotopia #50 - Heterotopia Michel Foucault French Philosophy Photography

2014

Born in Paris, Karine Laval currently lives and works in New York. Educated at the University of La Sorbonne and the University of ASSAS in Paris, she studied communication and journalism, and completed her education with photography and design courses at Cooper Union, SVA and the New School of New York. Since the beginning of her career, Laval has alternated agency and magazine commissions and publications (Here is New York 2002) with an artistic practice, that combines portraiture of personalities from the cultural world with images of geographical locations (France, Norway, Portugal, Cuba) and visual narratives. Her photographs are notably spontaneous and reminiscent of the photographs of masters such as Henri Cartier-Bresson or William Eggleston, with whom she shares a similar use of color as an expressive tool. This is evident in The Pool, which focuses on the leisurely environments of swimming pools and outdoor lidos in summertime. Laval’s images transport viewers into naïve atmospheres that capture the feeling as well as the substance of everyday life in the twenty-first century. Her work has also been widely exhibited in the United States and Europe at festivals and institutions such as the Palais de Tokyo (Paris, France), Lodz Festival (Poland), Rhubarb-Rhubarb (Birmingham, UK), and Les Rencontres d’Arles (France) as well as major solo shows at the Bonni Benrubi Gallery in New York and M+B Gallery in Los Angeles. Her work has been acquired by the Citibank Collection (New York), the Henry Buhl Collection (New York) and was exhibited as part of the Buhl Foundation Collection at the Guggenheim Museum, Collection Corbière (Paris) and the Contemporanea Collection (Rio de Janeiro).