Dolorès Marat

Dolorès Marat (b.1944) lives and works in Provence, France.

First a tailor, then a neighborhood photographer, Dolorès Marat worked as a lab assistant for Votre Beauté magazine until 1995. At 39, she began working as an independent photographer. In addition to her professional work, she carried out commissions for Hermès, J.M. Weston, Leica, and for daily newspapers such as Libération, Le Monde, and Les Inrockuptibles. She has published numerous monographs, most of which are out of print: Lune rouge et autres animaux familiers (Fario, 2021); Illusion (Filigrane, 2003); New York USA (Marval, 2002). Her work has been widely exhibited at the Aperture Gallery in New York, in Paris, Brussels, and at the GoEun Museum in Busan, South Korea.

In 2020, Marat donated 200 prints of her work to the Médiathèque de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine, which preserves the photographic heritage of the French State.

In 2023, a solo show, Dolorès Marat. Chromatic Disruption, presented at Les Rencontres de la Photographie in Arles, marked a key moment in the late recognition of her work. The "grande dame of photography" made her entrance into the Actes Sud historic Photo Poche series. That same year, she was awarded the first-ever Robert Delpire Book Prize for a personal body of work that demonstrates an authentic gaze—a vision, a personal expression “of what is seen, not mere observation,” as the French publisher, exhibition curator, and artistic director Robert Delpire said.

In 2024, the Fonds de dotation Neuf Cinq - Robert Delpire & Sarah Moon, and the Maison Européenne de la Photographie jointly organized a new exhibition of more than 60 prints at the Fondation Sozzani in Paris.

Marat photographs in haste, responding to her immediate instinct, and this rush is visible in her images. Neither reframed nor retouched, Marat’s photographs nonetheless present a wide range of colors, often emerging from the city’s artificial lighting. She is a photographer of the night, dreams, and transience—an artist who "talks of the ways in which her photographs 'come from the gut,' and memorialize moments when she instinctively feels 'the pulse of [a scene], the blood flowing through its veins,’" as Tim Adams put it in The Guardian. Her intimate world is populated with enigmas, seductive and sensual figures, and dead-end scenarios. Motion blur is a recognizable component of Marat’s work.

From four-color direct carbon printing (Fresson process) to pigment printing on artisanal Japanese paper by the SHL workshop in Arles, the materiality of the print lies at the heart of her practice.