Biography
Eliad Viel is a French-Canadian photographer living in Brussels.
Leaving her bourgeois and religious education, her photographic approach stems from the need to get out of comfort zone, her camera allowing her to transit between worlds. She likes the passage from one to the other, the journey to the appointment, the wait and the observation until complete immersion. She uses the photographic medium to open closed doors and dives into the world of prostitution. The notion of intimacy then appears to her to be central in her practice of photography and she becomes passionately attached to this place of observer and the opening of closed doors. She confronts the notion of family and takes family portraits in Tournaisian homes and brothels, but it is by passing through the doors of a famous Brussels drag queen cabaret that she discovers the true meaning of family and community. She then leaves her place as an observer to adopt a journalistic approach. To the capture of intimacy is added the notion of identity, everything mixes and binds, lovers in hotel rooms, friendship, the stage, the world of the night, backstage. She works the nude as a daily scene and represents the body far from idealization and fantasy.
The relationship to the body and the way of incarnating it becomes an obsession, she seeks the vital force in the physical imprint and is fascinated by physical transformation. She begins a series of surgical operations and aesthetic procedures that she films and photographs in the style of a documentary. With this last photographic series, she presents the conclusion of this personal research and joins the story of other bodies to her own.
