This series is composed of photographs for which I create characters, costumes and backgrounds.
My exotic pictures, between anthropology and cross-dressing, produce creatures full of colors which question the idea of the Other. It is a way for me to allude to the cultural melting pot that we all carry inside of us, even if it isn’t that obvious in a world where skin colour has more importance than we would hope.
Paintings of bathing odalisques, postcards of languid Moorish women or technicolor Arabian Nights stories…
My obsession for these exotic shots, both seductive and lurid, is at the root of the photographs I take today. Combining cultures and genders to infinity, I rely on the vocabulary of my everyday life to reinterpret the different representations of the Other which linger in our collective mind.
By representing this ‘sensual and wild’ Other which fascinates us we first represent ourselves and the society inside which we were born. Thus we reveal what is hidden from view through the observation/use/presence of familiar objects. Accepting the artificial in such a way makes it the subject/topic/centre of my pictures.
Representing objects in distorted ways is incongruous but no more absurd than the images we are confronted with every day.
Dressing up food destined for advertising photography to make them more appealing and therefore uneatable, or smoothing over hips deemed too generous to give a model a more attractive yet unattainable figure.
Similarly to advertising and postcards, I create dreamlike images but my exotic creatures give way to a disturbed universe, a hybrid between magic and banality. These bodies, though ever-present, are not used to posing in front of a camera. Their awkwardness adds to the general imperfection emanating from my photographs and reveals the ins and outs of my picture. These hesitant postures betray a form of humanity rarely present in advertisements. In such a way, I move away from the rules imposed on the representation of the body by the mainstream discourse.
Léa Magnien