Nude in the rock

Amateur photographer for about thirty years and member of the French Federation of Photography, I first started to photograph landscapes and cities in color, with an attraction for the traces of the past, the organic character of the mineral and the continuity of living.

Fifteen years ago, I made the decision to go in the exact opposite direction of what I knew how to do at the time: I turned to studio photography, the use of artificial lights and the leading of models. At the end of the 2000s, frequent trips abroad allowed me to discover artists who were rarely, if ever, shown in France, such as Dan Winter, Howard Schatz and Anderson & Low, whose treatments of the feminine around power, technology or sport escape sexualization and essentialist discourses. At the same time, I was also struck by Irving Penn's series of portraits made between 1946 and 1948 for Vogue magazine, in which personalities who usually control their image so well step out of the frame thanks to the artifice of a constraint - the inscription of the body in the obtuse angle of a wall. A device of discomfort can lead to having to assert ourselves more alive and free from the determinants that alienate us. I then began to work in search of this freedom on portraits and nudes.

The photographs in this project were produced using the holds and volumes of rocks usually frequented by climbers to lead the models to become one with nature again. It was the rock and the grammar - organic is its light - that made it possible for a network of constraints to free the body. It was a matter of leaving the models free to experiment with their movements, their balance and their placement in a geometry that was unfamiliar to them so that these women could also break free from the expectations in which photography tends to confine the female nude.