The 1,400 music lovers in the Gothenburg Concert Hall were glued to their seats and 100 musicians were already in place. The room fell silent on Thursday, October 9, around 7 p.m., when a man in a tuxedo took the stage and said in English: “Dear Sophie, tonight the Swedish National Orchestra will play for you. » Sophie is Frenchwoman Sophie Ristelhueber, who recently won the prestigious Hasselblad prize. Endowed with 181,000 euros, the prize, which bears the name of the camera held by American astronauts during their 1969 walk on the Moon, is worth the Nobel prize for photography.
Hasselblad, the Volvo emblem of Sweden’s second city, had its winner in mind. Three days of celebrations with French flags in the streets, concerts, exhibitions at the Museum of Fine Arts, press conferences, meetings with students, gala dinners with mayors, governors, French ambassadors… Alarmed by the excitement, the applicant was reassured by a Hasselblad executive: “As long as you don’t come in pajamas…”
After Gothenburg, the party continued in France. From November 13 to 16, under the glass roof of the Grand Palais, Sophie Ristelhueber was one of the stars of Paris Photo, the world’s most important trade fair for still images, with around 220 exhibitors. Upon entering, visitors will encounter an impressive 40-meter-long wall, where a visual masterpiece forty years in the making unfolds.
Sophie Ristelhueber, 76, is used to making flashes of light when you least expect it. The first was in 1982, when he was almost unknown, and it shows clearly: when he went to civil war-torn Beirut (150,000 people dead), he focused his camera only on the ruins of buildings, after the army had withdrawn and the pain was still there. He would reproduce these protocols – the decoration, not the people – in other places marked by recent history. It was primarily for this way of telling the conflict that he won the Hasselblad Prize, unanimously and without discussion, the jury president, John Fleetwood of South Africa, told us: “The jury praised the radical boldness of his visual language about the war, more poetic than documentary. »
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