Urban Poetry Photograph

Rachel B is a mixed media artist. She was born in Provence, south of France where she grew up. She is postgraduated at University of Provence in Sociology Anthropology. In her early twenties, she moved to Paris where she lived for 12 years. Rachel has made extensive use of photography in her analysis and social studies. She has started to use photography as a tool for analysis, and photography as a tool to communicate sociological understandings. It is often noted that sociology and photography were born during the same decades in Europe, and, as products of the same social events, one would expect cross-fertilization between what was, in fact, a new way of seeing (photography) and a new lens of interpretation (sociology).  When she moved to New York City in 2011, she started to nurture her curiosity for art photography.  Naturally, she fell in art photography creating her own vision of art photography by mixing images, urban language style and words. Rachel B has nurtured her passion for urban environment and history with a series of projects in New York City, where she lives. The work has taken her across the five boroughs and beyond to document her different projects. She sets the analysis of the urban studies she runs into images. Each series she realizes is the result of an urban topic she has focused on, using as analytical and methodology tools visual media, and using imagerie to communicate her feeling.   Her latest works capture from the quiet beauty and rich sense of place of Manhattan to the industrial heritage or historic architecture in Brooklyn. Like a walk through the urban area, like an urban exploration from the dreamed city to the forgotten city, from the urban regeneration of the industrial wasteland to the aestheticization of the waterfront developments. Rachel mostly works on black and white since it evokes to her the timelessness, the suspended time and the contrast. She works on her pictures with acrylic and/or stencil using an urban language “as graffiti can be”. As a passionate of literature and music, the words she paints on her pictures shall be an echo to a poem, a novel or a song and always an echo of time.