The Galerie La Forest Divonne-Paris is organizing the first solo exhibition of Elsa & Johanna (Johanna Benaïnous and Elsa Parra) on the occasion of the Photo Saint-Germain 2018 Festival. The exhibition is organized around two series of images, A Couple of Them, a series of 88 portraits created between 2014 and 2016, and a new unpublished series, Calgary, in 2018, both exploring portraiture and identity. For the series A Couple of Them, the two artists take turns slipping into the shoes of characters observed in the street or simply imagined according to their urban explorations. A set of touching characters, shouting true to life, one would swear to have already met: the album of a generation, in a way. The exhibition confronts these portraits with a new series of images, more intimate.
While the portraits of A Couple of Them are mainly captured on the street or in public spaces, according to an objective shooting protocol, the unpublished series Calgary, penetrates the intimacy of its subjects by photographing them in their interiors, in more personal situations. The shots are less fixed, more varied in their framing, illustrating a more subjective point of view, sheltered by the walls of houses and individual apartments, in the city and in the countryside, thus continuing the artistic research started in 2014 by the two photographers. Elsa & Johanna once again interpret their character, in this disturbing photo album where the same faces lend their features to characters so different, meeting the universal and the particular.
Spotted at the 2016 Montrouge Salon, finalists of the 2016 HSBC Photography Prize, nominated the same year for the 2016 Emerige Revelations Scholarship, Johanna Benaïnous (1991) and Elsa Parra (1990) form a duo of visual artists, photographers and producers.
They met at the School of Visual Art in New York and received congratulations from the jury of the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 2015.
ELSA & JOHANNA
Until December 1st, 2018
GALLERY LA FOREST DIVONNE
12 rue des Beaux-Arts – 75006
www.galerielaforestdivonne.com
