Lise Sarfati will sign her book The New Life, published by Twin Palms, tomorrow, thursday the 16 of december, from 4 to 9pm at the Magnum gallery in Paris.
In a recent issue of Aperture, Sandra Phillips wrote :
Sarfati is best known for her photographs of young people, mainly teenagers trying to figure out who they are, what they will do, where they will be. We sense in these pictures, as we often do with adolescents, that they are hiding themselves, concealing something, playing at being someone, even though Sarfati is open and sympathetic to them. Many of the young girls she photographs have made themselves up with ingenious and colorful makeup and hair, a disguise as much as an expression. Or they recline in their rooms like voluptuous odalisques-but privately, just for themselves. Hardly aware of the person making the pictures, they reveal an impenetrable languorousness that is beautiful and particular and also somehow unnerving.
Sarfati has said: “Perhaps adolescence is the only true time of life.” She has also stated: “I like doubles, like mothers and daughters, or sisters, or reflections. This represents my research in women’s identity. . . . I am interested in fixing that instability.” What Sarfati calls her photographic “research” into the “instability” of women’s identity has evolved in the course of three distinct projects, conceived as a totality. The first project, Immaculate (2006-07), looked at the rarefied world of Catholic girls’ schools surrounded by gardens (“like Eden,” Sarfati notes). The children who attend these schools are protected in a kind of cultural bell jar; they seem strangely, even disturbingly untouched, and separated from the concerns of the world outside.
Sandra S. Phillips
“Lise Sarfati, She” Aperture Magazine 194 Spring 2009
Magnum Gallery
13, rue de l’Abbaye
75006 Paris
