Discover Adèle Marchetti’s World Through the Lens of Analog Photography
Adèle Marchetti discovered photography through the analog cameras she unearthed at flea markets and objects with their own past lives. From those early black-and-white experiments emerged a fascination with time, silence, and permanence. For her, monochrome felt like a way to pause the world, to find reassurance in its timeless calm.
At MAG The Women Gallery, we will explore her distinctive artistic style.
A fluid dialogue between the visual and the textual:
Adèle’s education centered on the creation of photographic space. After a brief period at La Cambre School in Belgium, she earned her Bachelor’s degree in Art, specializing in Image, from Lumière University Lyon 2, followed by a Master’s degree from EMA Fructidor in Chalon-sur-Saône in 2021.
Her artistic signature lies in the fluid dialogue between the visual and the textual, between the tactile gesture and the intangible trace. She photographs the people who surround her and the landscapes she inhabits. Working from her personal archives, initially analog and later digital. Marchetti appreciates the contrast between the slowness of film and the immediacy of digital imagery. Yet her process always returns to the hand.
“I draw lines like incisions on photographic paper,” she explains. “The handwritten texts reference books, astronomical definitions, or fictional works.”
Ireland (2022)
In her studio, images are never final, they are transformed, scratched, inked, and inscribed.
Each photograph becomes both a physical and emotional surface, a site of memory, tension, and reinterpretation. The poem “Burnt Norton” by T.S. Eliot served as the catalyst for her series Line, where poetry, image, and time converge in quiet resonance.
Exhibitions and Remarkable Works:
In 2018, Camera Magazine published one of her reworked photographs from a trip to Ireland. Three years later, her solo exhibition “Line”, held at the former Kodak factory in Chalon-sur-Saône, featured prints on jute canvases alongside a video installation titled “Down the Passage that We Did Not Take.” Projected within a darkened room, as if inside a mind, the installation blurred the boundaries between the living and the dead, featuring images of her sister, great-grandmother, and partner.
That same year, Marchetti took part in “Crossed Times”, a group exhibition at Atelier Royal in Lyon, where she presented her hand-worked photographs using mixed media. In September 2021, for the launch of the american magazine Speciwomen in Paris, she exhibited a black-and-white street photograph taken in Brussels and expanding her practice toward a more documentary gaze.
Threshold (2022)
Her work resurfaced in 2024 at the collective exhibition “Still I Rise” at Pavé d’Orsay Gallery in Paris. There, she presented an analog photograph from her archives, what she calls an “isolated image.” Captured in the ruins of Lyon’s ancient Roman theater at Fourvière, it stands as a meditation on decay, endurance, and the fragile persistence of memory.
Today, Adèle Marchetti continues to explore the intersections of visual and musical creation. Her practice traces lines that are both literal and metaphorical gestures of incision, memory, and rebirth. In her hands, the photograph becomes more than an image: it becomes a living surface, a constellation of what remains and what refuses to fade.
Stay tuned for upcoming features on our blog, and a closer look at Marchetti’s latest series only at MAG The Women Gallery.
Sources: https://www.magthewomengallery.com/artists/adele-marchetti/