Marie Sueur explores the boundaries of photography, focusing on the unconscious, emotional, and uncontrollable aspects. Her approach blends staged portraits with images collected over years, creating layered, mixed-media series.

Her series Murmures de l'âme draws on the territory of dreams as one of the few remaining spaces beyond rational governance, using blur, reflection, negative imagery, and a palette of black, white, and yellow to suspend the viewer between waking life and imagination. Recurring motifs of circles and closed-eyed women anchor the work in themes of femininity, interiority, and cyclical time.

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Marie Sueur's work starts with a subtle challenge to the modern world. "In a time when everything seems regulated, I am intrigued by the aspects we cannot easily control. I am attracted to the shadows and mysteries that even cutting-edge technologies haven't yet penetrated." Her photography mainly explores emotions and the unconscious, inherently elusive themes.

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In a time when everything seems regulated, I am intrigued by the aspects we cannot easily control.

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A Language of Symbols

Among these unexplored areas, the unconscious dominates her thoughts the most. “A vast realm of ambiguities and dizziness, sharing its truths through symbols and dreams. I aim to navigate this mental terrain where reasoning yields to instinct, where language fails, and images become dominant.”

Her series consistently feature a blend of landscapes, portraits, animals, plant elements, and objects. “When I choose to develop a series, I craft staged portraits that embody the intended concept and incorporate earlier photographs to contribute to the story." The outcome is a collection of layered meanings instead of simple documentation.

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Her connection to her inner life also appears in her work, though perhaps in a seemingly contradictory way. “I have noticed that when I feel calm, I tend to create monochrome series, whereas when I am going through a period of anxiety, I turn to colour.” In this sense, her photographs reflect her emotional state inversely.

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Dreaming as Freedom

With Murmures de l’âme, she explores dreams as one of the last territories where we are completely free and beyond control. "It is a visual wandering through fragments of memory, blurred intuitions, and buried emotions, an attempt not to capture raw reality, but a silent vibration, a fleeting trace of shadow or light that consciousness struggles to name."

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Observing her work invites not just understanding but feeling. It presents sensitive projections that disrupt perception.  “What we believe we see, what we choose to ignore, and what is subtly observing us back.” For Marie Sueur, it’s a journey into our innermost, most hidden selves. “Perhaps this is our final freedom: a space where nothing is predetermined, nothing is controlled. A resilient realm where we cease performing and just exist—confused, incoherent, and alive.”

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Embroidered with hair

Her current work expands on these themes into new material areas. She is developing a series called Fragments in Times, which explores themes of motherhood, maternal instinct, and transmission. “The photographs are altered through manual perforations, and some are embroidered with hair of my own or my daughter’s.” The physical act of making marks upon the photograph brings a dimension of time and body that digital process cannot replicate. "These hand interventions evoke transmission and rootedness, as well as the unspoken and the secrets passed down through generations."

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About

Based in Paris, France, Marie grew up in a nomadic family. Her sister was born in Chad, her brother in Morocco, and she in Cameroon. These multicultural beginnings nurtured her curiosity for discovery, human encounters, and the unexpected. She uses the medium to explore emotions, the unconscious, and subjects that resist definition. Rather than depicting reality, her work seeks to reveal what lies beneath it: the poetic, the metaphorical, the mysterious. Her photographs have been shown internationally. In 2025, she was named Discovery of the Year at the IPA International Photography Awards.

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www.marsueur.wixsite.com/photo