The French-Swiss photographer, born to Vietnamese roots and raised in Paris, splits her work into registers that shouldn't logically share a homepage: glamour and adrenaline, "with the speed of a fighter jet," as she puts it herself. One gallery holds concert pianists, ballet dancers mid-leap in magenta light, and choirs caught under the gilded ceiling of an opera house. The next holds an ice climber disappearing into a glacial crevasse, military divers wading through dark water rifle-first, a wingsuit jumper stepping out of a cargo plane over the Alps, a hot air balloon's burner roaring at dawn.
"Photographer specialised in events, I look for poetry in and outside the beaten path," she writes. That curiosity for "the velvet of encounters" is what sends her into concert halls and galas. But she's just as drawn to the opposite instinct: deliberately destabilising herself, leaving her comfort zone in punishing terrain, as a way of getting to know herself better. Glacio-speleology, high mountains, and military air bases are her preferred ground. Cold, fatigue, and difficulty become a kind of password, she says, the price of admission to photograph exceptional people in extraordinary places.
It would be easy to read these as two different photographers sharing a domain name. Du Chastel reads it as one practice with two speeds.
"The idea is to capture, with intensity, life's contrasts between softness and intensity."
Softness, because she's also a mother of three with a husband who's passionate about sailing. Intensity, because she cultivates a love of life where every day is meant to be lived like a gift. Her remaining galleries, portraits (black and white and colour, studio-based, built around drawing out personality), nature landscapes, and a series on children, sit comfortably between those two poles rather than apart from them.
What makes a site like this work isn't just strong images; it's a structure that lets six visually distinct bodies of work coexist without flattening into sameness. Each of Anne du Chastel's galleries runs its own layout and mood, exactly the kind of per-page flexibility Portfoliobox is built around: a slideshow for the concert work, a tighter grid for the action shots, something quieter for portraits, all on one domain, all unmistakably the same photographer underneath.
See her full body of work at anneduchastel.com, or browse Portfoliobox templates built for photographers who, like her, refuse to pick just one register.
