Sandra MEHL

Sandra Mehl grew up in Sète and has documented this beach during three summers, from 2012 to 2014. Each of her solitary walk on this place is a meeting with a secretly preserved territory, apart from the rustles of the world, where members of a lagoon community live, perpetuating the rites of popular sociability and the vernacular know-how of the Mediterranean coast. This series is the intimate tale of a recovered astonishment towards the familiar, those of her childhood and of a territory, a way of life spared by our industrial and urban modernity.

Exhibitions

2018

P.S. : je t’écris de la plage des Mouettes

salon Polyptyque, Marseille

31.08.2018 – 02.09.2018

P.S. : je t’écris de la plage des Mouettes

Salon Photo Doc. 
Espace des Blancs Manteaux, Paris

04.05.2018 – 06.05.2018

Biography

Sandra Mehl graduated from Sciences Po Paris and EHESS in sociology. She starts working as a foreign aid worker and then in urban development before devoting herself to documentary photography. She is interested in the issues of territories and identities in France and abroad. She began in 2009 a documentary photographic project in Israel/Palestine on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall (“Checkpoint Chronicle”), finalist of the Prix Roger Pic de la Scam in 2016. Afterwards, his photographic work becomes more intimate, taking an interest in questions of belonging and social mobility in popular environments, relying on his own life trajectory. She works for five years on the lagoon areas of the South of France (p.s. : je t’écris de la plage des Mouettes) then in the urban area, documenting the daily intimacy of two teenage sisters from the Cité Gély in Montpellier (Ilona et Maddelena). This last series is the winner of the Bourse du Talent 2016 and of the Prix du Festival MAP Toulouse 2016. 

In parallel to her personal photographic projects, she collaborates with the French press (Le Monde, Libération, Courrier international, L’Obs, Le Monde diplomatique, Marie Claire, Mediapart, La Vie, Le Parisien magazine, Jdd) and the foreign press (Internazionale, Financial Times Week end magazine, De Morgen, Vision magazine China), and also carries out institutional orders.

 

 

Press

2018
Fisheye Magazine, may 2018