To accompany the re-edition of the work entitled “What is a woman worth: a treatise on the moral and practical education of young girls” published in 1893, The Eyes Publishing wanted a female eye to cast her sensitivity and her emotions on this work from another time.
The duo Elsa & Johanna reinterprets with the singular look of today’s artists this vision of women from another time.
Surprised by the denial made to women of their humanity and their own sensitivity, the two photographers set out to meet a very diverse set of female personalities.
Following the thread of the 24 hours that make up a day (the 12 hours of the day, the 12 hours of the night), Elsa and Johanna identified with twenty-four women whom they alternately embodied or photographed behind closed doors in their home. If we always find women in a domestic setting, they are out of step with the usual representation. They are not busy with household chores and are not reduced to the single cliché of gentleness, compassion and sacrifice for others. On the contrary, we find them all abstracted from their spatial and temporal framework, frozen in a lasting present, that of their own reverie. The choice of black and white film, unprecedented in the work of Elsa and Johanna, is precisely intended to provide these women and their emotions with a timeless character.
This constellation of 24 women forms a pictorial mythology of which the viewer only has to elucidate the story, too long buried behind the unequivocal veil of what has been called feminine nature.
Elsa&Johanna intitulée : Les douze heures du jour et de la nuit
The Eyes Publishing
https://theeyes.eu/en/livres/ce-que-vaut-une-femme-les-douze-heures-du-jour-et-de-la-nuit/
Galerie La Forest Divonne
12 rue des Beaux-Arts – 75006 Paris
+33 (0)1 40 29 97 52
www.galerielaforestdivonne.com
