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 Delaney, 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 Delaney), the Harvey Milk Photo Center (San Francisco), and the Livermore Art Association. She is an artist in residence at Jettison Creative in San Francisco, October 2025.

Despite our world turning digital, she believes in the power and beauty of film photography, and its delicate colors. Never far from her Rolleiflex, she recently went into large format photography with a Graflex camera, into small format with a Nikon fm2, and into super 8 movies. 

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.

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