Biography

Clémentine Schneidermann is a documentary photographer who recently graduated from the University of South Wales, Newport where she gained an MA in documentary photography. She discovered photography at the age of 16, inspired by Parisian street life. In 2009, she moved to Switzerland to study photography at the applied art school of Vevey where she found her interest in documentary photography and more generally, photographing people. In 2012, she decided to continue her formation at the University of South Wales.
Clémentine has been working on various personal projects, in Spain, Greece, Germany, England and more recently in the United States. Her latest project was a journey between Wales and Memphis looking for Elvis Presley fans. With a certain tenderness, her pictures depict people often left aside, and forgotten. Her work I called her Lisa-Marie, funded by Ideastap, was exhibited during Paris Photo with SFR jeunes talents in November 2014.

She is currently living and working between Wales and Paris.

Nicolas always said when we were kids that he had a small TV in his head. He would always watch it, switch channels and never get bored.

Maybe he is still looking at it, now that he lives in the mountain with his two dogs.

Nicolas is my brother. He left home when he was 17, to become a shepherd in southern France. He grew up in Paris, therefore he hadn't any specific bond with the agricultural field.

I started photographing him five years ago, when he was living in a caravan and wouldn't talk to anyone. He would call himself the "mountain's hobo".

Now he is less angry against society and our family and even started to enjoy to catch up with my mum on the phone.

Le Grand Silence is a work started in 2010 and is still in progress, with the aim of following my brother's evolution in the long run.

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Myths know no frontiers. The Elvis legend far outsteps the gilt and hangings of Graceland, in Memphis Tennessee. In fact, it is just as alive on the side of the Atlantic, in Porthcawl, a small town in South Wales that holds a festival in honour of the King in September each year. Between Tennessee and Wales the fans bear an uncanny resemblance to each other, all clones of a double-chinned idol with his slicked-back quiff, all children of the zone and the stack of money, all laying claim to the fat belly and the kitsch of the parvenu idol. With their petrol-blue shirts and billowing skirts, these doubles of Elvis and Priscillia act out the same sweet dream, one clinking with glory and posterity. Nothing in these images by Clémentine Schneidermann gives any hint which side of the Atlantic we are on and it is the miracle of these photographs located midway between fiction and document that highlights a planet Elvis, which inhabited by sadfaced people who show the marks of life and yet who invent radiant destinies for themselves, far beyond the misfortunes of fate and the shattered globe of the day-to-day.

Text by Natacha Wolinski (2014)