Claudine Doury — Amour
Rencontres de la photo en Gaspésie
Route du 2 Rang, Maria, QC G0C 1Y0 (CANADA)
From July 15 to September 30, 2021
Claudine Doury went to the Russian Far East for the first time in 1991, then in 1997, to witness the lives of the people who settled along the banks of the Amur River.
Twenty years later, she returned to the region in search of the Nanaï, Ultchi, and Nivkh families she had met on her previous trips. She wanted to bear witness to the passage of time on these families photographed at the time, but also to the changes that had taken place on a larger scale in these populations.
This current and intimate portrait of the native peoples of Amur allows us to redefine the contours of a territory that bears the traces of its history: the conquest of the East through the arrival of the Cossacks and the Russian settlement over the centuries.
Like the Amur River, Claudine Doury’s images constitute a set of layers, historical, temporal and physical. In an approach that is both artistic and documentary, her photography is a tangible form of the idea of loss, but also of what remains.
Claudine Doury is the 2017 winner of the Prize Marc Ladreit de Lacharrière – Académie des Beaux-arts for her project “A Siberian Odyssey,” which made possible the realization of this work.