‘STELLA’ BY ANNE-CHARLOTTE MOULARD

Stella is a photography and film project by Anne-Charlotte Moulard that explores the world of seaside resorts and the people who live there year-round. It takes Stella, the resort where the artist grew up and still lives today and an area designed to welcome short-term visitors, as its starting point.

Spanning twenty years (2005–2025), the project explores the tensions between belonging and erasure, personal memory and collective narrative. Through photography, a film and interviews, it documents a region’s transformations and explores how to live sustainably in a place that is designed for the fleeting visitor. And, in doing so, it poses a question: who does a place belong to – those who pass through it or those who live there?

Far from being a documentary-style account, Stella draws on cinematic language, particularly the American Western aesthetic. Landscapes bathed in twilight alternate with portraits of the locals, whilst the saturated colours and the recurring use of the colour red give the images a fictional quality. Comprising 55 photographs, the series captures not the objective reality of a place, but rather the sensations, memories and imaginings associated with it.

This is part of Anne-Charlotte Moulard’s broader approach. Having studied in Paris and London – at Penninghen, Gobelins, Central Saint Martins and ENS Louis Lumière – the artist develops her own body of work alongside her commissions for brands and institutions. This work places portraits, staging and storytelling at its heart, maintaining a constant dialogue between reality and fiction.

With a particular affinity for the regions of northern France, she is interested in the way places shape people and their memories. Her photographs seek not to capture a moment, but rather to bring a story to life – sometimes a real one, sometimes one that has been reinterpreted. Landscapes, objects and characters therefore form part of the same narrative, in which individual experience merges with a more collective memory. With Stella, this exploration takes on an autobiographical dimension: that of an artist who, through the landscape of her childhood, examines what remains of places and the people who inhabit them.

Stella is the subject of a new photography book published by Four Eyes. The film is also being screened until the 19th December at the MAC Créteil Theatre as part of the ‘200 LUX’ exhibition, in collaboration with the Rencontres d’Arles festival, which is a member of the LUX network.

www.annecharlottemoulard.com
@annecharlottemoulard