Exponent
Maude Bardet is a French photographer currently living in the Netherlands. After studying engineering, she first worked in Berlin and then ended up in the Hague, Holland. She always had fernweh – as the Germans say – and invariably construed her jobs as mere tools to finance her travels. Photography was a constant throughout her numerous trips: first mostly interested in architectural photography and then slowly getting intrigued by fellow humans.
Environmental portraiture from far away places was then her topic of choice. Yet she was not feeling fully satisfied, as the constant quest for more exotic subjects seemed a tad futile. She discovered street photography in 2017 during a workshop with Nikos Economopoulos in Cape Coast, Ghana, and felt like this was exactly what she had been looking for.
Any place can yield a good street photograph, as the burden is on the photographer to see decisive moments and compose an image around them. There is no longer any imperative to seek hardly reachable places, walking the same streets repeatedly can in fact bring better results. Meeting Maciej Dakowicz brought her work to a different level – her images are now more complex and carefully composed. Guided by light and textures, she tries to portray a slice of the human condition.
She likes to use strong colors to emphasize the compositional elements in her pictures. Her work has emerged mainly through online platforms, particularly Instagram. The work of Women Street Photographers to promote female photographers has been a crucial help in achieving some visibility.
She was featured in Miami Street Photography festival in 2019 and 2020, Brussels Street Photography festivals in 2019 and 2024, in OpenWalls in Arles in 2020, in the Women In Street ‘Two Way Street‘ exhibition in San Francisco (2019) and ‘Double Trouble‘ in Sydney (2020), and in Women Street Photographers exhibitions in New York (each year from 2018 to 2025), Kuala Lumpur (2019 to 2021), Trieste (2020), Chelyabinsk (2020), Hyderabad (2020 and 2022), Paris (2021), Rome (2024) and Brazil (2025).
She is the winner of a Remarkable Reward in Trieste 2020, an Honorable mention in Trieste in 2024 and of the Independent Photographer “street photography” competition 2020. She won the 3rd place of the LensCulture street photography awards in 2021 and was finalist with a series in 2023 and with single pictures in 2022 and 2024. She was a category winner at the Lucie Foundation Open Call: Carte Blanche in 2022.
