Born in Grenoble, France in 1980, Blandine Soulage lives and works in Lyon. After attaining a master's degree in International Cultural Management at Sciences Po Lyon, she developed her first career in production with the French Institute, the Lyon Opera, and the Biennale de la Danse.
In 2013, Soulage began her artistic career by training in photography at the Gobelins School. Her work explores the architecture of bodies and their relationship to space. Her visual language is characterized by bold color, staging, lighting, styling, and graphic composition. Soulage also integrates screen printing into her practice to create unique visual objects through the pictorial and chromatic reinterpretation of her photos. Inks, screens, solid areas, and superpositions allow a return to materiality and plastic experimentation.
Soulage's Déviation series displays bodies in unexpected postures that deviate from the ordinary to the extra-ordinary. Unpredicted trajectories, misdirections, reversals of perspective disorganize reality, drawing their own poetic routes. These images feature anonymous characters whose faces are never visible, their various “body patterns” opening up a world of fictions with open-ended interpretations. Created in collaboration with dancers, these images place their movement potential at the service of imaginary narratives. Composed around the graphic and chromatic possibilities of minimalist architectures, these images invite negative space as a breath within the frenetic rhythm of the city.
In 2023, the Déviation series won second prize from the jury of the Les Rencontres d'Arles X Fuji competition. From September to December 2023, the series was the subject of a public photographic installation in Lyon. In addition to her fine art work, Soulage carries out photographic commissions in the cultural and institutional sectors, as well as for brands and agencies. Her images are regularly published in French media such as Les Inrocks, Libération, Télérama, Le Monde. Soulage also teaches as part of the European Bachelor of Photography program at Bloo School Lyon.