Born in 1967 in Senlis, France.
Lives and works in Montreuil.
Nathalie Boutté began working with paper after a career in publishing and graphic design. Paper gradually became her preferred medium. She meticulously cuts all kinds of paper—sometimes pages from old books, road maps, banknotes, and above all, sheets of Japanese paper. On these sheets, she first prints a text connected to the history of the photographed subjects or to the photographer who inspired her. By varying the thickness of the letters and the spacing between the lines, she creates a “range of grays” similar to that of early silver-gelatin photographic prints. Like photography itself, her work lies at the crossroads of fixing and creating an image.
Her artistic approach began with her discovery of early photographic processes—daguerreotypes, autochromes, the first media for capturing photographic images. Fascinated by these images and the stories of the past, she carefully reconstructs portraits by assembling tiny paper strips one by one.
The clean cuts, the fineness of the paper, and its layering give her works a sculptural quality. Seen up close, the viewer’s gaze is caught in a tangle of letters; step back, and the image gradually emerges as the eye adjusts to the collage. In her work, Boutté calls upon the legacy of historical photographers such as Edward Curtis, Malick Sidibé, and Seydou Keïta, exploring photography as a marker of memory. She revives the memory of individuals, of eras, and of traces of the past. In place of aged photographic fragments, she substitutes fragments of Japanese paper and pages from old books.