As a student at the École des Beaux-Arts in Nantes, Céline Duval began to explore advertising photography, carefully clipping images from magazines and later gathering postcards and family photos, uncovering the stereotypes inherent within vernaculars uses of images. In 1999 as she became a professional iconographer, she decided to work under the name “documentation céline duval”.

doc-cd’s oeuvre takes the form of a photographic collection made up of different kinds of images: some taken by the artist, others collected from an array of printed media (amateur snaps, postcards, advertisements, etc.). Far from static or fixed, this collection is open to donations, loans, exchanges and even destruction. Its thousands of images can be seen through a lens of comparison, confrontation and accumulation, revealing the uses of photographs beyond the anecdotal. Classified, catalogued, the artist considers them a form of writing in their own right; no additional explanatory text necessary. It is as part of this framework that doc-cd refuses, on the one hand, to allow the images to be exhibited in an institutional context, where they would inevitably be placed side by side to form an ensemble, and on the other, to feature a particular photograph for aesthetic reasons. Sobriety trumps the demonstrative, such that the images may be seen as themselves and not as illustrations.

Having almost always the collection as its starting point, doc-cd’s works play with the potentials of the printed image, in installations (wallpaper, advertising lollipops, flags), prints (screenprints, offset posters), postcards, collages (the 1998-2007 series tilt, in which two images confront and echo each other), and so on. Since 2001 the artist has created printed publications, beginning with the Revue en quatre images (comprising sixty issues spanning 2001 to 2009), in which each issue sets four images from anonymous family snapshots in conversation with one another, chosen by theme: picnic behind a car, game of blind man’s buff, photographs of libraries, etc. Between 2001 and 2002 she released seven Cahiers d’images in collaboration with Hans-Peter Feldmann (1941-2023). Following this, she created artist’s books, alone (sur un pied, 2010; cœur, point et ligne sur plan, 2013, based on the Wassily Kandinsky collection) and in collaboration (a game titled le cahier du dimanche with Serge Elleinstein, 2006; l’édifice with Nicolas Fructus, 2008-2009).

In 2010 doc-cd burned part of the collection, effectively destroying all reproducible images, such as those from magazines and advertisements. She documented this implacable, ritualised destruction in a series of videos, Les allumeuses 1998-2010 (2011). From that moment onwards, the artist has added no new images to the collection, and at the end of that decade she donated it to the Royal Museum of Mariemont in Belgium. From 2004 to 2024 she taught at ésam Caen, her teaching evolving from the topic of printed images to that of garden wildlife. The subject of interactions between beings, having always fascinated her in photography, now flourishes in her work within the association le chant des ourses (with Blandine Barthélemy): freed from images, Céline Duval seeks to discover new ways of living and existing in movement.