The Eye of Photography is releasing the September chapter of “Cartes Blanches”, with the support of MPB. Each month, a French photographer publishes an exclusive series captured while experimenting with equipment loaned by the international platform for buying, selling, and trading photo and video equipment.
While last month, Anaïs Kugel’s was questioning identity and intimacy, this new chapter by Diane Givry’s explores the opportunity for permanence of self-portrait. This ‘eternal return of the same’ allows her to study, examine and even play with the self in a way that is as dizzying as it is elegant.
Diane Givry – Selected Self-portraits
“The starting point for this series of images is the choice of equipment. Having worked with beautiful but technically rigid film cameras (a Rolleicord and a Toyo 4×5 for large format), I wanted to try a camera with greater flexibility, allowing me to take self-portraits with a different approach. I am delighted with the possibilities offered by this Leica Q2 Monochrome, its simplicity, its very wide-angle lens (which allowed me to get very close to my reflection!), and its fabulous black and white.
I have been taking self-portraits for a few years now, and I wanted to show here, as a glimpse of a more general practice, a new variation. These self-portraits are indeed an infinity of variations on the same theme: it is the eternal return of the same (the same me!), in different spaces, times, and settings. That’s why I have titled this series simply: “Selected Self-Portraits.”
Reflections, mirrors, frames, windows, or the eye of the camera are all media to talk about these self-portraits. I present myself in different facets, sometimes as a shadow, showing only an arm, a hand, part of a face, an untethered body, with intentional or unintentional distortions—a reality to be recomposed. What I love about self-portraiture is the total control the photographer has over their images and their representation. They are the model, photographer, and decision-maker. Self-portraits, unless chosen otherwise, are always consciously thought out and selected. The viewer ultimately sees only what the photographer has doubly decided to show: through the choice of the image and through the attitude and setting planned. Everything is representation anyway, and here you see a snippet of this theater”.
Diane Givry
Born in 1991, Diane Givry lives and works in Haute-Savoie, France. Her photographic practice is entirely based on film photography and, throughout her series, she weaves a gaze on the body, primarily the female body. She is self-taught in photography and has learned through contact with her peers. She is also specialized in the photography of art objects and heritage pieces, which reflects in her work through a keen attention to staging.
Her self-portraits reveal a sober aesthetic, a relationship with the camera as well as with her own image made up of suggestions, fragments, the visible, and the implied. Her work is marked by particularly meticulous staging, emphasizing chiaroscuro, penumbras, grays, and bursts of light. The presence of the camera recalls a tradition of self-portraiture akin to Ilse Bing, Ergy Landau, and aesthetic that plays with mirrors and her immediate environment, often stripped down to a few objects, linking her to Francesca Woodman.
While any comparison with peers is always in vain, as it is countless and endless, Diane Givry’s series “Selected Self-Portraits” showcases a poetic imagination in the use of her own body, an eternal continuation of the possibilities of her own representation.
The artist and The Eye of Photography warmly thank the photographic equipment resale platform MPB for their support and the loan of different gears. The Carte Blanche column would not be possible without their contribution.
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