Are we ever free? Some literature heroines raise the problem. Subordinated to a masculine world, victims of their condition or the time in which they live, but also prey to their own torment, many of them have no influence over the course of their existence, while others try to do so, the most courageous regardless of eventual disastrous consequences. The photographer Anne Kuhn looked into ill-treated heroines, those who have gone astray, on the forgotten geniuses.
In two juxtaposed photographs, she depicts Emma Bovary, Lolita or Thérèse Desqueyroux between fiction and allegory, bringing their story into a more contemporary context. First staged as she imagined them when reading the novel, then changing their destiny to question women’s freedom, and hers at the same time.
In parallel with the two photographs, a question is put on a universal topic such as expectation, revolt, etiquette or recognition.In the end, we get an interdependent set comprising a diptych, a question, and answer from the models – of different times and backgrounds – and a carefully chosen extract from a literary work.
“Anne Kuhn still confuses the issue”, writes Michèle Fitoussi, a journalist with Elle magazine. “She takes her heroines out of the frame and does it with talent, in the manner of an intimist painter. She knows the importance of chiaroscuro. Under her eye, no one is who we think she is. With other opportunities, Emma would laugh, Rosalie would sing, Célestine would scream. Free, at last? That’s to be seen.”
Following a career as a professional dancer, at the age of thirty-five, Anne Kuhn decided to make photography her profession. After having been a portraitist under contract with Gamma photos agency, her world took shape on films sets. During this period, her artistic style firmed up, out of a constant concern of bringing mystery and poetry to the fore, for which she takes her inspiration from the baroque construction and the pure, contrasty lighting of the seventeenth century.
Anne Kuhn, Héroïnes
Published by Contrejour
30€
