Drawing her inspiration from the mid-century cinema and brutalist architecture movement, Swiss photographer Alicia Dubuis creates daring, yet delicate compositions that exude a sense of softness.For still life, fashion or architecture work, she captures authentic moments with a great eye for details. Since her debut, she has developed a constant search for colour and a meticulous approch for textures. Her visual signature highlights a subtle balance between minimal lines and deep hues. With a background in graphic design and extended knowledge inprinting processes, she gives her photographs a further dimension by altering them through different techniques, such as collage and scanning. Dubuis offers thus a new materiality to her work, expressing her own interpretation of reality. Dubuis contributes to publications such as T Le Temps or Annabelle Magazine. Her commercial clients includes Hermès, Rowse and Vacheron Constantin.
Photographers of ACTWALL
Photographers of ACTWALL
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Alicia Dubuis
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Delphine Schacher
Born in Nyon in 1981 and graduating from the Vevey School of Photography in 2014, she completed her training with a dissertation dedicated to the use of mise-en-scene in documentary work. All of her work explores social and human realities and difficulties through projects that question the place of man in his geographical, historical and social environment, and also tackles the notion of memory and remembrance.
In 2013, she won the SFR Jeunes talents prize and the VFG Jeunes talents prize with her series ‘Petite robe de fête’. In 2014, she produced ‘La mécanique céleste’ as part of the Valais photographic survey. As a recipient of a grant from the NCCR Lives (National Centre of Competence in Research), she produced her work ‘Bois des Frères’, which was nominated in the final of the Swiss Photo Awards in 2016. In the following years, she will produce the series ‘Yangon Autels’ during a year with her family in Burma, followed by ‘Journal de veille’ during the confinement, which presents a dialogue between the words of newspapers and photographs from her daily life. Finally, in 2021 and 2023, at the invitation of the Musée de Bagnes and then the PALP festival, she produced ‘Montagne Show’ and ‘Jardin du souvenir’.
Her work has been exhibited on numerous occasions, including at the Rencontres photographiques d’Arles, the Photoforum Pasquart in Bienne, the Journées photographiques de Bienne, the Visions du Réel festival in Nyon and at various venues and festivals in Switzerland, France, Portugal and Holland.
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Diego Saldiva
Born in Guarulhos, Brazil, in 1983, Diego Saldiva studied social communications in São Paulo before moving to Switzerland to study at the Vevey School of Photography. He won the Photoforum prize in Biel (Switzerland). He was also a finalist in the 15th and 22nd Nachwuchsförderpreis and nominated for the Paul Huff Prize. Between brutality and tenderness, reality and fantasy: the works of photographer Diego Saldiva exude a disturbing and moving ambivalence. In his series Break of Day (2010), awarded the Prix Photoforum Bienne in 2011, the photographer attempts to capture the impressions and feelings that stir within him during the premature birth of his son and his rare and serious illness. Since 2008, Diego Saldiva has lived in Berne and São Paulo, Guarulhos’ hometown. He dedicated the photo series Momentos e Máculas (Bad Spots In Our Best Times) to her. The photographer observes the rapid architectural evolution of Guarulhos, which is also changing the way the inhabitants live together. His gaze is melancholy, interested and precise. He walks between the houses, along the river, on the playground and in the living spaces, questioning the status of people in the built environment. How do you occupy your territory, what does “home” mean? Finally, in his Gigantes series, which he has been photographing since 2012, Diego Saldiva takes as his starting point a popular TV show from the 1970s: Os Gigantes do Ringue (The Ring Giants). These wrestling matches, based on the Mexican fight show Lucha Libre, have lost their lustre. But the wrestlers portrayed by Diego Saldiva also assume identities with masks, tattoos and dresses whose mythology transports them beyond everyday reality.
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Etienne Francey
Etienne Francey was born in 1997 in Fribourg, Switzerland. He graduated from the Vevey School of Photography in 2019. He works as a freelance photographer mainly in the commercial or editorial field (landscape, product, object).
His artistic work is intimately linked to nature. In a constant quest to transform reality and the wild world, he uses various artifices to distort, color, illuminate, refract… sometimes approaching painting or the abstract. His work has been published in newspapers and magazines such as L’Illustré, Fisheye and The Guardian. He was awarded the Hermann Elsner Prize in 2017 and is a four-time winner of the prestigious Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition organized by London’s Natural History Museum.
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François Schaer
Swiss photographer, born in 1967. Trained at CEPP (Centre d’Enseignement Photographique Professionnel, Yverdon) between 1990 and 1992, François Schaer pursues a parallel artistic and commercial career. His subjects are as varied as the world of snow and skiing, soccer in the slums of Nairobi, the decontextualization of museum objects, popular Mexican bullfighting, the image of women in London and solitude in Tokyo. His work has been published and exhibited in Switzerland and abroad.
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Katharina von Flotow
In the past, painters would place a beetle, a precious stone or a string of pearls at the foot of a vase containing splendid bouquets. These small objects and insects have long been interpreted as pretexts for meditation on the principle of vanitas: like flowers, riches and life are ephemeral. Whether they were spiritual reflections or homages to the delicate nature of plants, these highly decorative paintings remain, in any case, timeless. In the same way, Katharina von Flotow’s timeless compositions create a delicate world that inexorably decays, drawing the viewer into a dreamlike meditation that is also open to a thousand interpretations.
(Mayte Garcia)Katharina von Flotow, who was born in Canada and lives and works in Geneva, is an audio-visual, film, design and photography artist. A director of documentary films (Le musée d’Hitler, Le grand voyage de Darwin, Jean Jacques Rousseau tout dire, Seed Warriors, Ce cher Musée…), the artist creates a personal world in parallel with her artistic research. In this photographic work, she explores the passage of time through the world of plants.
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Kleio Obergfell
Kleio Obergfell was born in Geneva in 1989. After studying anthropology and political science at the University of Lyon2, she returned to Geneva to train in metal construction at the Ateliers de Décors de Théâtre de la Ville de Genève. Kleio then went on to study visual arts at the Haute école d’arts et design in Geneva, where she obtained her Bachelor’s degree in 2015, followed by her Master’s degree in June 2017.
Kleio Obergfell uses photography to study the role of the medium in revealing an imaginary world and an ideology. Her work is rooted in a primarily sociological or anthropological approach. She is interested in the history of technology and its impact on the collective unconscious. She also creates sculptures and reproductions of objects for her photographs, combining her skills as a metalworker and jeweller.
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Marc Renaud
Marc Renaud was born in Lausanne in 1969. He completed an apprenticeship as a photographer and then trained in documentary photography at the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York.
He has developed a number of documentary projects on social issues (notably security, work and money). In 2014 he won the Fribourg photographic survey with Dossier hospitalier, a work on hospital reforms. In 2016 he published the book en fusion on the process of merging communes and in 2019 No Blackout on electricity in Switzerland and the issues surrounding its provenance. Organisation and societal structures are recurring themes in Marc Renaud’s work. In particular, he focuses on the state of change, evolution and reform.
How is change initiated in our society? What drives and hinders it? And to what end? These images have been shown in numerous group and solo exhibitions in galleries and festivals in Switzerland and Europe. He publishes his own work or work commissioned by the national and international press (notably in NZZ Folio, Geo, Le Temps, Liberation, Animan, Du, Amica (Italy), Esquire (Russia), Basler Zeitung, SonntagsBlick, Der Bund, etc.).
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Olivier Lovey
Born in 1981 in Martigny, Olivier Lovey is a graduate of the Vevey photography school (2011). His work has been exhibited at the Prix Photoforum 2012, 2014, 2018 Selection/Auswahl in Bienne, the Prix Voies-off in Arles 2013, the 18th Prix de jeunes talents vfg en photographie in 2014 and the Boutographies in Montpellier, where he received the Prix Réponses Photo. In 2018, he exhibited at the Images de Vevey festival and won first prize at the Swiss Photo Awards in the Fine Arts category with his series Miroirs aux alouettes. In 2019, he exhibits at the Athens Photo Graphie Festival, the Gibellina Photoroad Festival in Sicily and at Ferme Asile in solo. In 2020, he is one of 31 winners of the FeatureShoot Emerging Photography Awards and exhibits in New York. In 2021, he received the Grand Prix de l’Enquête valaisanne 2 for his series La danse des Balrogs.
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Philippe Ayral
Philippe Ayral is a silver laboratory specialist, working between France and Switzerland. Fascinated by silver processes, he never ceases to explore these techniques, with a particular predilection for platinum-palladium and etching.
One day in the 1960s, a friend who had just received a Werra 24x36mm camera as a gift spoke to him about depth of field, and it was then that he discovered that photography had creative possibilities. In 1969, he decided to break with his beatnik period and hitchhiked around the Middle East with a camera. His images of Buzkachi in Kabul were published in Paris-Match and those of his nomads were distributed by the Jacana and Explorer agencies. On his return in early 1970, he began working by day in photographic businesses in Geneva such as Photo Verdaine and Photo Hall. At night, he photographed in black and white for various clients such as the Jelmoli group. In the early 1990s, he discovered platinum-palladium printing and ordered the latest ready-to-use paper from the United States. Barely able to master this printing process, production ceased. However, undeterred, he remained enthusiastic and decided to prepare the chemistry needed for this printing process himself. During 2014 and 2015, he spent hours recording with photographer and master practitioner Denis Brihat, in order to retain his extensive technical knowledge.
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Rahel Oberhummer
Rahel Oberhummer is a Swiss artist whose work lies at the intersection of science and abstraction. Her practice — which is developed in close collaboration with scientific experts — focuses in particular on the observation of natural phenomena. With a transdisciplinary artistic perspective combining microbiology, photography, publishing and sculpture, her work questions the way human societies treat and interact with the environment and its inhabitants.
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Samuel Devanthéry
Self-taught and a jack-of-all-trades in photography, Samuel Devanthery (1987) uses images to question reality and our relationship with the world. His photography is often frontal and cold, materializing singular or fictional universes. His work tends to mobilize our imaginations and elaborate forward-looking narratives.
After exploring various horizons, from architectural studies to alpine pastoralism, since 2021 he has devoted himself essentially to his passion for images, between commissions and personal work. He lives in Geneva and works elsewhere.
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Virginie Rebetez
Virginie Rebetez’s work is often described as “making the dead speak”. For some fifteen years now, she has been penetrating the space created by absence to create traces and imprints of what is no longer there, challenging the photographic medium through new narrative forms. Her work revolves tirelessly around the question of memory, disappearance and death, and the different levels of reality that intertwine in the worlds of the in-between: between the here and the hereafter, memory and oblivion, the living and the disappeared. For each of her portraits, far removed from any macabre voyeurism, she investigates, gathers, assembles and constructs photographic narratives as powerful as they are subtle, as moving as they are poetic, using archival documents, photo albums, personal objects, police documents and even ghostly traces and clues.
Virginie Rebetez has received numerous grants and cultural awards, including the Irène Reymond Prize (2021), the Swiss Fine Arts Grant (2019), l’Enquête photographique fribourgeoise (2018), the Leenards Foundation Grant (2014) and the Swiss Design Awards (2014). She has also taken part in several artist residency programmes organised by Pro Helvetia in Johannesburg (2013), Cairo (2016) and by the canton of Vaud in New York (2014). She has published three books: Out of the Blue in 2016, Malleus Maleficarum in 2018, both of which won awards, and La Levée des Corps in 2024. Her work can be found in numerous public and private collections.