Isabelle CHAPUIS
Photographer

 Isabelle photographed the portraits of the artists supported by Porosus in 2024.

What is your artistic background?
I was born in Paris in 1982. From childhood, my practices of dance and life drawing oriented my art towards the human body. After graduating from Penninghen in 2005 with a degree in art direction, I chose photography as my medium of expression. My work ranges from fine art photography to therapeutic photography. These two dimensions feed into and reinforce each other. Curiosity about how we exist in the world is at the heart of my work. I regularly take long journeys, which are a source of inspiration and essential self-questioning. I won the Prix Picto in 2010. Two years later, my work was awarded the Bourse du Talent and exhibited at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France François Mitterrand, which added it to its photographic collection. Since then, my work has been regularly exhibited in galleries and institutions, including the Rencontres d'Arles festival (2023), the Galerie Analix Forever (Geneva, 2023), the Les Femmes s'Exposent festival (Houlgate, 2023) the 110 Galerie (Paris, 2022), the Palais Galliera (Paris, 2018), the Planches Contact festival (Deauville, 2018), the Grand Musée du Parfum (Paris, 2016), and the Centre d'Art Contemporain du Château des Adhémar (Montélimar, 2016). My work has also been exhibited in the United States at Espace Snap (2015), as well as in Asia at the Daegu Photography Biennale (South Korea, 2023), Galerie Paris 1839 (Hong Kong, 2016), during Franco-Chinese Environment Month (China, 2016) and at French May (Hong Kong, 2013). In 2022, I published my first book, Vivant, Le Sacre du Corps, which was shortlisted for the Rencontres d'Arles Author's Book Prize and awarded the HiP Prize. I am currently the artist associated with the 2024/25 season of the Opéra d'Avignon.

How do you view your profession today?
In my creative work, I seek to capture the unity contained in every detail of life as perceived by our senses. For several years now, alongside my visual photography, the attitude of listening to what is trying to reveal itself has led me to train and develop a therapeutic practice. By using photography as a reflective medium and offering a loving gaze to the forms of the body hardened by life's events, these forms find space to dissolve and renew themselves. A transformation becomes possible, a little closer to the essential truth of Being.

How do you see yourself in five years? In 10 years?
I am moving towards an increasingly plastic form of photography. For several years now, I have been painting with earth on my photographic prints. My accompaniments are also gradually changing and expanding to include other therapeutic approaches. I am currently working on a hybrid format of photographic film. I find mixing media very fulfilling.

Interview conducted in 2025
Photographs taken by Isabelle Chapuis in 2025