This photograph depicts an elderly Croatian woman walking past a window that reflects a small crowd. The faded reflection of a young woman watches with her arms crossed.

Weight (Lbs): 5.5
Height (In.): 19.25
Width (In.): 22.5
Depth (In.): 1.75
Size: 244.5 x 4.0 x 4.0"
Maker: Sophie Ebaz
Material: Film, Paper
Date: 1993
Provenance:
Condition: No noticed damage at time of description.
History: Born in 1960 in Paris, Sophie Elbaz left to Mexico in 1980 where she took her first photographs. She spent a whole year between Guatemala and Mexico. Upon her return to Paris, she decided to leave for the States in 1983 where she assisted the American artists Ernestine Ruben, Patrick Demarchelier and Gilles Peress. In 1984, she was accepted in the intensive photojournalism program of F. Ritchin, then Picture Editor at the New York Times, at the International Center of Photography (I.C.P.) in New York In 1986, she was given her first reporter assignment by Reuters to cover West Africa where she was charged with current events in twenty-two African countries. Africa would be a veritable initiation which resonated in her deeper self. In 1989, she joined the Sygma agency after working as a reporter in India. She would be the only woman in the Sygma «news magazine» department and report on critical events that strongly influenced her vision of life. During the Balkan war, thanks to a grant "Villa Medicis hors les murs", she spent three years constructing «Contre toute attente» (Against all expectations), a black-and-white photographic essay exposed at many festival or Museum. The next year, she parted with the world of photo agencies to engage in a more personal creative project, "Mémoire d'Elles", which began in 1996 with the support of AFAA (rebaptized Cultures France), an intimate mosaic on four generations of French women during the course of a century. A book went to print in 1998, soon followed by two itinerant exhibitions, which travelled through the French cultural network from the Middle-East to Africa until 2003. In 1995, she also discovered Cuba. In her own rendering of the Garcia Lorca opera house in Havana, a set of photos that would be widely exhibited . From 2000 to 2005, she devoted herself entirely to her artistic work and has been developing a technique allowing her to rework pictures using organic components. This experimentation allows her to transform the images from her travels. This led her to bring a completely different world of imagination into her work, a world of emotion derived from a process of subtraction in which chemistry gradually changes fixed notions of what a photograph is. Origines, an African serie of these «metamorphoses», initially exhibited during a festival in Bamako in 2003, were also displayed in Barcelona, Milan, Berne and Paris during 2004. In 2006, she presented the Indian series: "Were are you about ?" By this new set of images done in different environment, she lived a transcendence of inner violence while she was enduring the process of disease during 18 months. In 2007, Sophie Elbaz was invited to participate in the 8th Sharjah Biennial in the United Arab Emirates. The Biennial's theme focused on the environment. Elbaz set out to produce an organic photographic work, reinforcing the idea of the contamination of the environment throughout time. It is entitled I Accuse. In 2007, I went to Constantine in search of my Sephardic origins on my father's side. There, I made an initial, poetic film in memory of my grandfather, Jonathan Elbaz, and the Île fantastique triptych. In 2008, The others side of the self (L'envers de soi) includes some of the most significant work from the photographic career of Sophie Elbaz was presented at the prestigeous European Center for Photography (MEP), Paris, France from june to september 2008. She presents her more recent work under a trilogy entitled Aleyo, on the theme of the Sacred, the Body, and Politics. In 2012, Interior Geographies is shown at The MAHJ, The Museum of Arts and History of Judaïsm for the Month of Photography in Paris. The exhibition is divided into four distinct spaces and combining photographs, videos and family archives, it describes the process by which the artist has reappropriated her family history. The several trips she made to Constantine and Algeria gave rise to a complex, ecstatic then painful confrontation with reality. It is with an entirely new vision, drawing on images from the past and those she created herself, that she is now expressing both her enchantment and disenchantment, the driving forces of a singular and extremely personal work.