Student Shortlist

Pauly’s great grandmothers, Olga and Pacha, were born in Dniepropetrovsk (now Dnipro) in Ukraine. In 1942 they were deported to Germany as Ostarbeiter (‘workers from the East’) to perform forced labour. After the war, they arrived in France to embark on ‘a new beginning’. At the end of her life, Olga wrote her memoirs, which – for unknown reasons – were burned by her son. Through this project, the photographer aims to explore this forgotten story, combining family archives and staged photographs.

I was born near Paris and grew up partly in Nantes with my parents and my two brothers. I came back to Paris to study Photography. Before coming to ENS Louis Lumière I made a Higher National Diploma in photography, also in Paris.