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Emilie Muller

Awarded

Emilie Muller

Photo research 'Maja Marina Jelena'

Photography

Jury report

Between one’s own image and a foreign image
How do young women view them­selves? How do they cre­ate their own image land­scapes? Who would they like to be? Pho­tog­ra­pher Em­i­lie Muller from the west­ern part of Switzer­land pur­sues these ques­tions in her book pro­ject 'Maja Ma­rina Je­lena'. The book thrives on the ten­sion be­tween one's own and a for­eign image. It must be said that she is not only a pho­tog­ra­pher but as an ed­i­tor and arranger of pic­tures she also in­ter­acts with for­eign pho­tos. By co­in­ci­dence Em­i­lie Muller, trained at the ECAL in Lau­sanne, met three young women of Ser­bian ori­gin at a swim­ming pool. They were good-look­ing, per­fectly made-up, the pho­tog­ra­pher re­calls, and seemed to lead a glam­orous life. All three of them were young moth­ers and liv­ing in tiny apart­ments in Yver­don in the Can­ton of Vaud. Over a pe­riod of four years the pho­tog­ra­pher ob­served the three young women. She writes that with this pro­ject she was able to turn away from staged pho­tog­ra­phy be­cause all the top­ics she was in­ter­ested in, she found plenty of ma­te­r­ial in the sur­round­ings of Maja, Ma­rina and Je­lena: the fe­male world, the re­la­tion­ship with one's own body, sen­su­al­ity, the ref­er­ence to the past. The book of­fers two dif­fer­ent in­tel­li­gently in­ter­twined per­spec­tives: on the one hand, it shows pic­tures the three young women made of them­selves in which a per­fect out­fit, provoca­tive poses and a per­ma­nent over-sex­u­al­i­sa­tion played a cru­cial role. On the other hand, we fol­low the pho­tog­ra­pher's gaze which pro­duces more clin­i­cal, doc­u­men­tary and less glam­orous re­sults. Em­i­lie Muller ac­com­pa­nied her mod­els on a jour­ney to Ser­bia, which she de­scribes as a kind of ini­ti­a­tion trip to trace the ori­gin of the three women. That Maja, Ma­rina and Je­lena con­sider the re­sult of the se­ries as too 're­al­is­tic' and not in­ter­est­ing enough is not fur­ther sur­pris­ing: dif­fer­ent points of view and role mod­els are at odds with each other here.
Peter Stohler

Biography

Emilie Muller
Born in
1980
Education
Photographer

also in

2014

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