Artist talk with Hasselblad Award winner Sophie Ristelhueber

Sophie Ristelhueber has explored how war, conflict, and historical events leave traces, not only in human lives but also in landscapes and surroundings. Her practice often revisits places where power, politics, and territory have been renegotiated through violence.

In Fait (1992), she documents the Kuwaiti landscape after the Gulf War by focusing on traces rather than events. Avoiding depictions of people, she instead turns the camera toward the ground, toward what remains after conflict.

In later works like Every One (1994), the focus shifts to the human body: scars photographed in clinical settings and presented in large format with the same sobriety she uses in portraying landscapes.

Ristelhueber’s work is marked by a methodical and restrained aesthetic, where form and content interact to open questions about memory, place, and representation. Her visual language moves between documentary and conceptual practices without fully aligning with either tradition.