France

Maitetxu Etcheverria

Biography

Maitetxu Etcheverria (b.1975) is a French photographer and graduate of the National Photogaphy School, 2001.

Her work captures fictional constructions that generate and shelter the imagination.

This includes the cinema, television and theater as well as our immediate environment, which all provide her with infinite material and a profusion of artificial worlds that are "truer than nature" albeit nourished by archetypes.

As witnesses and mirrors of the world, they play the role of revelators of our collective culture.

The photographer's way of seeing offers us a panoramic view of a simulated and hyperrealistic "fabricated possibility."

Maitetxu's photographs set up an endless play of "images of images" that confuse our ability to define that which is proposed to our view, highlighting the ambiguity as much of the subject as its representation.

Bucharest, Saint Petersburg and Sofia, with their inexpensive labor costs, are the three main locations for building large‐scale sets for Hollywood films. The production studios seen here are on the periphery of the Romanian capitol and produce both big foreign fiction films and local soap operas, which are very popular in Romania. In these images we see some young Romanian actors from these soaps, who accepted to pose for a few moments for the photographer’s camera.

This first studio experience took place on the premises of the Fémis, the School of Image and Sound Professions (l’Ecole des Métiers de l’Image et du Son) in Paris. The photographs are of decors created by set design students for the school’s short film graduation projects. This work gave rise to the publication of a monograph, Décors, published by Belleza Infinita Editions, in 2004.

Fictions investigates the representation of institutions and authority in fiction. It shows the movements of a prisoner from arrest to lock-up in the cell. The images of offices and interrogation rooms were shot in the Romanian film studios in Bucharest, while those of the prison environment were taken on theset of the film Un Prophète by Jacques Audiard, in the suburbs of Paris.