DashBook publishes Épreuves bleues by Julie Michelet.
Épreuves bleues is an artist’s book built around the cyanotype, an early photographic process whose deep blue becomes here the territory of an intimate exploration of identity. Through portraits, self-portraits and staged scenes, Julie Michelet interrogates what constitutes an individual: what is visible, what is lived, what is inherited and what is transformed.
The images answer one another, overlap and metamorphose across the pages, tracing an identity in motion, built from successive layers rather than fixed outlines. From the collective to the intimate, from appearance to interiority, Épreuves bleues offers a visual journey in which the notions of embodiment, memory and transformation intersect within a singular photographic language.
The book is part of a broader research into the fabrication of the image and of the self. By incorporating manual gestures, constructed sets, painted backdrops and cyanotype traces, Julie Michelet makes of each image a living surface, in which process matters as much as result. Identity is never presented as a given state, but as a material in constant elaboration, shaped by visible and invisible forces.
What we show, what we go through, what shapes us. – Julie Michelet
Julie Michelet is a French visual artist, photographer and artistic director based in Paris. She develops a practice at the crossroads of photography, staging and art direction, exploring the links between image, narrative and the construction of identity.
Trained at the École supérieure d’art et de design de Reims (ESAD), she discovered photography as a primary language of creation and narration. She has since built a body of work nourished by cinematic and pictorial influences, in which each image is conceived as a composed scene on the border between reality and fiction. Her work has spread rapidly across social media, immediately generating interest in her singular visual world and her approach to constructing photographic narratives.
Her practice extends into the fields of fashion, publishing and art direction, notably through collaborations with brands and projects involving portraiture and visual creation. This professional experience nourishes a more intimate personal research, centred on the representation of the body, of role and of identity.
Julie Michelet also develops an experimental practice around the materiality of the image. She incorporates manual processes such as painted backdrops, constructed sets and cyanotype, which she uses as a plastic as much as a photographic tool. This artisanal dimension introduces a physicality into the image and reinforces the idea of a visible fabrication process.
In her work, identity appears as a fluid and transformable system, constructed through successive social, symbolic and intimate strata, in which staging becomes a means of self-exploration as much as a deconstruction of representations.
www.juliemichelet.com
@julie_michelet
Julie Michelet : Épreuves bleues
DashBook
Publication date: June 2026
Hardcover
150 pages
Dimensions: 20 × 24 cm
Price: €39.90
https://dashbook.fr/book/epreuves-bleues?preview=true
