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Julien Gremaud

Awarded

Julien Gremaud

'Thatcher is Dead', series of photographies, diploma work

Photography

Jury report

Thatcher is dead
Julien Gre­maud’s pho­tographs deal with press im­ages and the way they are in­flu­enced and dis­sem­i­nated by the media. The work is cen­tred on a sin­gle major event in British po­lit­i­cal his­tory: the death of for­mer Prime Min­is­ter Mar­garet Thatcher.
The fi­nal-year pro­ject, with which Gre­maud grad­u­ated from ECAL, the Uni­ver­sity of Art and De­sign in Lau­sanne, in 2013, con­sists of a pub­li­ca­tion in the form of a num­ber of col­lages as well as large-for­mat prints. Gre­maud de­scribes the com­bi­na­tion of a num­ber of su­per­im­posed im­ages drawn from news­pa­per pho­tographs from the Thatcher era and con­tem­po­rary pic­tures as an ‘anti-dated bitmap col­lage’.
The in­ter­mesh­ing of nu­mer­ous in­di­vid­ual im­ages in­evitably re­sults in a whole that is time-con­sum­ing and dif­fi­cult to read; de­prived of dates, com­ments or points of ref­er­ence, the viewer is forced to ex­am­ine the work closely in order to make sense of it.
The tech­nique used for the col­lages leaves them some­where be­tween ab­strac­tion and plat­i­tude: news­pa­per clip­pings merge with coloured press pho­tos to cre­ate a com­plex, in­ter­wo­ven net­work that re­quires in­tense en­gage­ment from the viewer.
In this pho­to­graphic pro­ject, Julien Gre­maud has brought to­gether his in­ter­ests in a va­ri­ety of themes in­clud­ing pol­i­tics, the media, his­tory, com­mu­ni­ca­tion and so­ci­ol­ogy and trans­lated them into a vi­su­ally fas­ci­nat­ing cre­ation.
Mar­tina Longo

Biography

Julien Gremaud
Born in
1984
Education
Photographer

Web

www.juliengremaud.ch

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