Claudine Doury — Amour, une odyssée sibérienne
Exhibition: 4 April to 31 May 2026
Opening: Friday 3 April at 6.30 pm, attended by Claudine Doury
Talk: Saturday 4 April at 10 am: Claudine Doury, ‘An intimate view of the world’
Centre Jean Moulin
Place Jean Moulin – 33300 Bordeaux, FRANCE
Claudine Doury traveled to the Russian Far East for the first time in 1991, and again in 1997, to document the lives of the peoples who have settled along the Amur River.
Traveling along its banks, she journeyed from Nergen to Bogorodskoye, passing through the villages of Bulava and Us-Gur.
Twenty years later, thanks to the Marc Ladreit de Lacharrière Prize from the Academy of Fine Arts, which she won in 2017, she returned to the region to reconnect with the Nanai, Ulch, and Nivkh families she had met during her previous trips.
In doing so, she aims to document the passage of time on these families photographed back then, as well as the changes that may have occurred on a larger scale among these vulnerable populations.
This contemporary and intimate portrait of the indigenous peoples of the Amur helps redefine the contours of a territory that bears the traces of its history: the conquest of the East, including the arrival of the Cossacks and Slavic settlement over the centuries.
Claudine Doury’s images form a layered whole—historical, temporal, and physical. Through an approach that is both artistic and documentary, her photography is a tangible expression of the idea of loss, but also of what remains.
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