Le petit chien dans la forêt

Dolorès Marat is a self-taught photographer. First an apprentice to Claude Froissard, a neighborhood photographer, then a lab technician at Votre Beauté magazine, she began her personal work at nearly forty. Ever since, she has photographed by instinct, without cropping or retouching, guided by her emotions: subway stations, carnivals, zoos, hotel rooms, roads in Jordan or the streets of New York. Her images, filled with enigmas and strange atmospheres, are resolutely blurred, as if taken in a hurried gesture. Drawn to the night and the blue hour, she captures the city’s artificial lights and draws from them an unexpected palette, somewhere between dream and unease.

A skillful colorist, this grande dame of French photography long entrusted her prints to Michel Fresson, master of the four-color carbon process, which gives her colors their singular texture.

Long kept out of the limelight, her work was celebrated in 2023 with the exhibition Dérèglement chromatique (Chromatic Disruption) at the Rencontres d’Arles, a Photo Poche monograph published by Actes Sud, and the first Robert Delpire Book Prize.
She is represented by Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York.