Clément Chapillon is a french documentary photographer focus on the link between the land and the people. His passion for photography started when his father gave him the first film camera at 17 years old. Then, he shaped his eye and built a personal approach based on human perspective during several travelings, especially a one year trip to meet local communities in Asia, Melanesia and South America. In 2016 he quit his job in a communication agency to focus on photography and to work on new personal projects.
He made the Gobelins school program and he started a documentary work on Israel and Palestine during several long term trips to the middle-east. This work called “Promise Me a Land” was published in media & newspaper (Le monde, Arte, L’OBS,…), was exhibited in several festivals (Voies-Off Arles, Circulations, Tbilissi…) and won the Leica Prize in 2017 in Arles who allowed him to make a solo show in Leica Galery in Paris in april 2018. New exhibitions will come in Paris in september / october 2018 (CNAM, MAC) and in Jerusalem (Willy Brandt Center) and the book “Promise Me a Land” was published by Kehrer Verlag in may 2018.
About ‘Promise me a land’:
In the book of Genesis, man is named “Adam”, whose etymological root “Adama” in Hebrew refers to earth and the clay that is its substance and its home. Ties between a man and his land have always been deep and complex, but rarely as incensed as in Israel-Palestine.After more than a century of forced coexistence and 70 years of open conflict, those living in this territory seem ever more bound to it. Clément Chapillon ventured out to investigate the various dimensions of this seemingly unalterable relationship: What marks has the land imprinted on their identity? What hopes, fantasies, and promises remain? To explore this attachment, far from clichés and ideologies, he interviewed and photographed people in cities, villages, settlements, kibbutzim. As a result, his book is a unique patchwork of words, portraits and landscapes that emphasize the intimate link that exists between the people and the land. This deeply personal testimony looks at the Israeli-Palestinian mosaic and its roots from a profoundly human perspective.
