His name: Mehdi Sotot.
His exhibition: Drag The Line is on until February 20th.
He introduces himself like this.
I come from the suburbs of Saint-Denis in the Ile de France, where my reputation has more than once crossed borders for bad reasons. I have always felt excluded from society as a person coming from a city where the majority of inhabitants remain invisible in order to make way for its basilica or its Stade de France. This is why throughout my career, I have always devoted myself to what people do not want to see. I started my work with images in the underground at a time when tattoos, skateboarding and barbers were not fashionable. Today, all this has become mainstream, which is why I have been interested for some time in an art form that does not fully find its place in society. A performing art that is both political and entertaining, an art of living for these artists who cannot fully express their art without putting themselves in danger. We are obviously talking about drag.
As a straight man, I navigated LGBTQIA+ art like a boat on a new sea. Before moving on to photography, I wanted to understand these artists, their functioning, their values as well as their different emotional stages before and after a show in order to show them my respect and the value they had in my eyes. For this, I spent a lot of time backstage before performances, developing my learning in the art of drag to understand their stories and what their claims. All this allowed me to develop a photographic style very rarely used in the Drag world.
The characters of the Drag scene are often perceived as chimerical beings, defying norms and imagination. Women and men like you will never meet anywhere else. A kind of Freak Show that makes some people salivate and for others, disgusts them. These artists live the love and hate of a society and once their transformation is complete and their Drag character touches ground, they are observed only through the prism of the character they embody. As if the human who inhabits them, their fragilities and their emotions disappeared under the Make-Up and the finery.
It is this distortion that I wanted to deconstruct through my photographic work. I don’t just capture figures, I seek to humanize these characters, to capture the intensity of their inner emotions. I break the visual codes of drag: the bright color, the perfect smoothing of the skin, the erasure of imperfections… and stage the Drag characters in a natural environment to reveal a rawer truth, the human that exists in them.
My photographic style, both raw and authentic, reveals another vision of Drag, where beauty is not necessarily highlighted. Above all, I want to present you an emotional and human aspect of an art of living. Demystify the fact that a character has no feelings and show you that through drag, hides a human being and not a character from a Freak Show.
Mehdi Sotot
Mehdi Sotot : Drag The Line at “Olympe” until February 20, 2025
Au 37 rue Hoche 93500 Pantin
@Lasototgraphy
