I'd like to think that my artwork is an invitation to daydream.
Just like Alice Through The Looking-glass, I'd like you to let yourself be carried away in my reveries, where time and gravity fade away, and water becomes a theater of metamorphoses...
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In a nutshell
My name is Charlotte Bories. I’m a French artist specialized in creative underwater photography.
I studied at Fine Art College and graduated in 2008 with honors, with a project entitled Memento Mori.
In 2019, after a few years working as an editor in a publishing company, I decided to rededicate myself to full-time artistic creation.
A year later, I won the “ND Special Discovery of the Year” award, with my Sleeping Beauty series, entirely shot underwater, on breath-hold.
I’m currently based in Bali, Indonesia.
MY STORY
When I was a child…
… I was living in a very isolated house, a bit strange and ragtag, whose walls were covered with carved stone faces — gleaned from church ruins. (I know this sounds a bit like the beginning of a horror story, but it’s not, I promise !) In my childish mind, these sculptures were some kind of magical guardians whose mission was to protect my family.
I'd often seek refuge in the attic and listen to the rain while devouring books. Up there, nestled under the roof, I felt free to dream, to disappear for a moment. I invented worlds inhabited by invisible creatures, and imagined the surrounding forests and ponds haunted by secret legends.
Perhaps that's where it all began: in those lonely hours when imagination overtook reality.
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My love story with water…
… came later, as I lived far from the sea.
My first scuba diving experience as a teenager remains an indelible memory : the Atlantic water was icy cold, we barely spotted a crab, and yet...
The magical sensation of breathing underwater, of floating among the seaweed as if I was flying through a liquid forest, left me in awe.
I had crossed a threshold, stepped through a mirror.
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This emotion has never
left me
I still have the feeling that diving underwater is like entering another world, a surreal world, that is both magnificent and eerie.
My pictures are imbued with this ambivalence: they hover between dream and nightmare, light and shadow, enchantment and melancholy.
Artistic influences
I've always been fascinated by the overwhelming beauty of the ephemeral, by the exaltation of feelings.
When I was in Fine Arts College, I studied obsessively Vanitas, Caravaggio, Dark Romanticism, Pre-Raphaelites... artistic styles where delicacy and darkness go hand in hand, where light dramatises as much as it reveals.
These influences permeate my vision and resonate in my underwater art, where bodies seem to float between two worlds, frozen in a fragile equilibrium on the edge of dream.
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Self portrait with diving suit, 2020.
