Fine Art Photographer
Claire Maen is a film photographer from France living in the area of San Francisco, California. She captures the poetic beauty of (post)industrial, commercial, and peri-urban landscapes with her 1951 and 1965 Rolleiflex film cameras. She is drawn to the edges, where land meets water, houses eat fields, and sand covers parking lots.
She finds inspiration in the esthetics of modernity developed by Charles Baudelaire and precisionism (Charles Sheeler, Edward Hopper, Georgia O'Keefe), and in the approach of landscapes developed by Robert Adams, Janet Delanay, Edward Burtynsky, Raymond Depardon, and Jürgen Nefzger. She learned photography with her father, a talented amateur photographer from France (Yves Tourmen, check his website), and took classes at the City College of San Francisco (with Sarah Christianson), the Berkeley Art Studio (Darkroom printing), Fotofilmic (with Janet Delanay), the Harvey Milk Photo Center (San Francisco), and the Livermore Art Association.
Despite our world turning digital, she believes in the power and beauty of film photography, and its delicate colors.
Claire is a member of East Bay Photo Collective (Ebpco, Oakland, CA), she has been a member of the Livermore Art Association (in charge of social media publicity) and is currently co-editing a zine on medium format photography called Rolleizine.
Highlights
Her photo "Dreamy Housing Project" is among the 11% photos selected by the De Young Museum of San Francisco to be exhibited during Fall 2023 among other local artists (De Young Open 2023)
10 photos of her series "Living one the Edge" have been selected as finalists for the Photolucida Critical Mass 2023
Her photo "Dreamy Housing Project" has been one of the 20 finalists of a Life Framer international competition "Home Sweet Home" (April 2023)
Her photo "Dreamy Housing Project" has been awarded "First Place" in the international juried contest from the New York Center for Photographic Art - category "Suburban" (June 2022)
Her series "Waiting for the Rain" has been published online by Dodho Magazine (April 2022): https://www.dodho.com/waiting-for-the-rain-by-claire-maen/
Photos from her series called "Fade Away" have been published by the art magazine Juniper Rag (#2): https://www.juniperrag.com
See her past and coming exhibitions here: exhibitions