About Caroline Hayeur
Caroline Hayeur has been a photojournalist for 18 years and is a member of Agence Stock Photo, a collective of independent photographers in Montreal. She did her first reportage in 1990: a cross-Canada tour entitled The Constitutional Crisis from Montreal to Vancouver. Through her work on portraits, reportages and editorial, she has traveled to the United-States (a six-month journey with a mini-van transformed as a photo laboratory), many times to Europe, to Russia, China and to Haiti.
She is a regular contributor to many of Quebec and Canada's publications and has also collaborated with international publications such as the Australian magazine Black and White (reportage on naked dancers), and publications specializing in music and night life: URB, The Wire, Shift, Wire. She is a correspondent for French dailies and weeklies such as Libération, Le Monde, Le Point and L'Express.
In 1996, she began to research the rave and techno scene in the Montreal area, a subject that had not been photographed in Quebec. With Festive Ritual: Portraits of the Rave Scene in Montreal Hayeur began her long involvement with the world of the night in all of its forms. She thus works within recurring themes: travel (real or imaginary), nocturnal fauna, friendship, rituals, and city life.
A resolutely optimistic photographer whose work is influenced by many years in the field, Hayeur's approach is steadfastly humanistic. For more than 15 years, she has been exploring how people become socialized around a certain quest for friendship and rituality. In contrast to paparazzi, she uses her camera to capture a variety of emotions and attitudes. Hayeur's works, firmly anchored in contemporary art photography, beyond the journalistic context, not chasing down "hot" news but recounting daily life in a unique way with her eye and her montages.
Truth is not the objective of her practice. Behind her search for universality, she is determined to make images of the "here and now."