Celine GROUARD
b. 1979, Maui, HI
I’m a portrait photographer chasing connection— or marking its absence. Portraiture is the heart of my work, with still life, stories, and locations peppered throughout. And the people and rooms of my own life.
I fell for photography as a child in Abu Dhabi, over the images in a National Geographic article I’d been assigned to write a school report on. I was ten, and those pictures showed me something I’d build the rest of myself around: a photographer could go anywhere. A few years later my great-aunt took me to the photography festival in Arles, where I learned the medium could do more than record a place. It could open another world, and be its own kind of travel. By fourteen I was shooting, developing film, and printing in a darkroom, and I’ve never looked back.
I studied at the San Francisco Art Institute and hold a BFA in Photography from California College of the Arts.
I spent fifteen years in editorial photography: first as a photo editor at WIRED in the Bay Area, and later at Fast Company, where I art directed and produced a wide range of shoots for the magazine and the website, from portraiture, still life, conceptual pieces, events, to whatever a story needed. Some of it was recognized by the Society of Publication Designers and American Photography. I have closed that chapter now, with immense gratitude for the colleagues who inspired me, the photo directors who trusted me, the subjects who let me see them, and, most of all, for the time behind the camera that honed my craft.
That first National Geographic set the course. I've rarely stayed in one place since, crossing continents as a child and the United States as an adult, with my longest stints being in the Bay Area and New York. These days I'm in Newburgh, New York, but I'm headed back to the Bay.
Wherever I land, the work comes down to the same thing: one person seeing another.
