Hemya Moran was born in Jerusalem in 1985. She graduated with an MA in Photography from the Royal College of Art at the Battersea Campus in London, where she now works and lives. She has received a Kenneth Lindsay Scholarship, a grant from the Lepsien Art foundation, and her work has been published with Black Dog Publishing and British Journal of Photography. Moran’s initial interest in photography revolves around the personal photo album and the decisive common ground between its parts, reflecting with each fragment a further assurance of the collector’s ideology. Today we share with you her series, Love in Deauville.
Love in Deauville
If you Google Deauville, like I did, you will get photographs of romantic couples sipping cocktails by the pool, playing on the beach and cuddling in hotel rooms. In these stock images there is a promise: a young, single girl armed with a bikini, determined enough for hunting and fishing for (preferably French) men in Deauville, will end up spending the weekend in the arms of a lover. I reenacted these stock image scenes with men I approached in Deauville – complete strangers who somehow fit the description or demeanour of the men depicted in the Google Images I had seen. In each of these captured encounters there lies a tension between existing romantic imagery, reality and reenactment. As my photographs go on to have a life of their own in the image world, they will themselves become swallowed up and incorporated into the online image bank, further complicating their slippery relationship with reality.
To view more of Hemya’s work please visit her website.