The women I work with are for me fantastic examples of what femininity is about nowadays. They have great strength of character, they invent alternative lives and characters for themselves. They are very independent women, their aspirations and stories never completely assailable. It's a kind of female dandyism that fascinates me and which I want to show. What I am interested in is this conquest of a new femininity that women today invent and reinvent ceaselessly. I never quite know what outfit I will find them in when I meet them. They have a taste for the paradoxical, linked to their ever changing desires. It is not being provocative in a showing off way ; it is rather an intimate behavior. They have multiple personas, as if they were suffering from some sort of delicious schizophrenia which is a consequence of being a modern woman. It is a constant movement between woman and child, between demure and artfully sexy. And I try to capture the most contradictory moments of her reality, from the Sunday's pyjamas to the most hybrid of outfits via the handbag, the washing up or the fishnet stockings. As for the triptych format, I must confess that it is women themselves who impose this tri-focal vision. It is their very nature, both carnivalesque and whimsical, that is the reason for the fragmented output. Not knowing whether they are women, children playing or Lolitas, they imply this multiplicity of angles and visions.
It is what happens at the instant of the photographic exchange. The circumstances of our meetings are hazardous. I never know beforehand whether the meeting is going to work. I give them total freedom of movement and action. I like them to interact with the objets around them and the place they are in. I only talk to them and try to get to know one another. When something does happen, it is as if they were inviting me into their own personal world, their dreams and games. I only talk to them and try to get to know one another. I only follow their emotional ramblings. But in fact, there is no real spontaneity. There is instead a theatre play without either real actors or spectators and without even a script. We don't really know what it is, but we kind of get the idea of the reason why it is being performed, why we do it.
Photography is a tool for knowledge. It is a mysterious way, a kind of X ray thingy, to enable us to see further than the realms of action and necessity. What I always realize also is that photography not only reveals but also creates a new reality which, until then, remained hidden because no one was looking at it. There is always a desire to see and learn between both actors of the photographic process ; photography invents and simultaneously reveals the moment. This is possible because at the origin of the photographic act is a meeting. It is this meeting photography is about, to allow the other to say whatever they can. Thus the name of the game, is to enable the possible to become real. What I particularly like is to listen to and photographing these women who create new, out of the box situations, among their own worlds of objects and inventions, a kind of intimate parallel world few people can step in to, or do.
interview for Plateform Mag