Awarded

Emilie Muller

'Les cendres au fond du jardin', photographies book

Photography

Jury report

Ashes at the bottom of the garden
Em­i­lie Muller re­ceives the Swiss De­sign Award for the sec­ond time this year, hav­ing first won it in 2006. The pho­tog­ra­pher, who trained at ECAL, the Uni­ver­sity of Art and De­sign in Lau­sanne, lives and works in the city. Her works in­vari­ably in­cor­po­rate el­e­ments of both re­portage and fash­ion pho­tog­ra­phy.
‘Les cen­dres au fond du jardin’ (‘Ashes at the bot­tom of the gar­den’), a book in two vol­umes, con­tains a num­ber of pho­tographs of peo­ple and ob­jects close to her. The work is con­structed on three pic­to­r­ial lev­els that are linked to­gether the­mat­i­cally: a re­portage of a trip to Tunisia with her fa­ther; archive pic­tures of her fam­ily; and pho­tographs of her own pro­jects.
The title is a ref­er­ence to a per­sonal fam­ily ex­pe­ri­ence: fol­low­ing the death of her grand­par­ents, whose ashes were scat­tered in the gar­den in front of the fam­ily home, in 2006 Em­i­lie Muller dis­cov­ered nu­mer­ous records and pho­tographs from her fam­ily’s past while clear­ing the house.
She com­bined her own re­search, the archive ma­te­r­ial and re­portage to cre­ate a work that op­er­ates on a num­ber of dif­fer­ent lev­els but is uni­fied by the es­sen­tial themes of mem­ory, per­sonal ex­pe­ri­ence and com­ing to terms with her fam­ily’s past. For all its per­sonal in­ti­macy, Em­i­lie Muller’s pho­to­graphic work deals with uni­ver­sal top­ics that every­one who sees it will recog­nise from their own ex­pe­ri­ence.
Mar­tina Longo

Biography

Emilie Muller
Born in
1980
Education
Photographer

also in

2006