Bourse du Talent 2026 : Delphine Blast

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Flowers have always fascinated me. Their fragile, ephemeral, and vibrant beauty has long nourished my imagination. But in Colombia, I encountered flowers whose beauty sometimes seemed torn away from the living world itself.

In 2022 and again in 2025, I visited large-scale flower farms around Bogotá and Medellín, discovering a universe that deeply unsettled me. My attention was first drawn to the workers—their repetitive gestures, the traces left by chemical products on bodies and landscapes alike. Gradually, however, my gaze shifted toward more hidden spaces, where flowers are artificially transformed to meet the demands of the international market.
Confronted with these almost unreal flowers, I experienced a sense of both visual and symbolic disquiet.

Through Flowers of Evil, I explore the ways in which living matter is altered, corrected, and reinvented to satisfy our aesthetic desires. The series combines documentary photography, staged portraits, studio images, and photographic negatives. The latter shift the flowers into a cold, clinical aesthetic reminiscent of scientific imagery, where they appear as bodies marked by transformation and toxicity.

Through this project, I seek to hold together aesthetic fascination and silent violence, revealing that troubling moment when the beauty of the living world becomes the very symptom of its transformation.

Delphine Blast is a French photographer whose work lies at the intersection of documentary, social, and artistic practices. Distinguished by a strong commitment to fieldwork, her visual language combines photography, staged scenes, artistic interventions, and participatory methods to create hybrid forms of storytelling.

Her projects explore social and intimate issues related to identity, representation, gender, and empowerment. From coming-of-age rituals to Indigenous communities, from invisible laborers to the elderly, her work highlights the dignity of individual journeys and the complexity of personal narratives.

Trained at EMI-CFD in Paris, she has been developing projects across Latin America, Africa, and France for more than a decade. Her series Quinceañeras, Cholitas, Flowers of the Isthmus, and Boxing Queens have received international recognition and have been exhibited widely.

Alongside her personal work, she collaborates with the press, cultural institutions, and NGOs, and regularly leads photography workshops.