In 17 ans (Seventeen) , her first photographic book published by Asiro Éditions, Sophie Glasser imagines a poetic manual of adolescence a sensitive tribute to this age of endless possibilities.
Seventeen. An age made famous by Arthur Rimbaud, in a line that has been quoted, and over-quoted: “One is not serious, when one is seventeen.” The poet speaks to us of carefreeness, lightness, naivety. And yet… when Sophie Glasser invites a group of young people to talk to her about the thoughts occupying their minds, she doesn’t expect the direction the conversation takes.
Sophie Glasser belongs to that category of creatives we love to call “jacks-of-all-trades” — full of ideas and gifted with golden hands. A set designer trained behind the scenes of the famous Martha Stewart, as well as an author and photographer, she released Le Gros Manuel twelve years ago (Supereditions, 2013): a kind of survival guide for keeping children busy, with everything from making a Calder-style mobile to cooking waffles. When she created that book, her own children were still very young. Now, on the threshold of adulthood and ready to leave the nest, she wonders whether a survival guide aimed at teenagers could see the day.
She invites her daughter and her friends to spend a day in her studio to talk about the kind of advice they would like to receive. “I had in mind a practical guide, in the same spirit as my first book but this time with photographs and I quickly realized I was completely off the mark.” While the conversation did touch on a few practical questions about manners and everyday life, the teenagers soon began opening up about deeply personal concerns: sexuality, mental health, anxieties about the future, lack of self-confidence, insomnia, and panic attacks.
With the whimsical and poetic tone that defines her work, Sophie Glasser draws from this heart-to-heart conversation a book that ended up being very different from what she initially envisioned. No larger than a hand, it brings together seventeen photographs — portraits and still lifes — paired with seventeen phrases that sketch a tender portrait of adolescence. With a minimalist design and a pastel bichromatic palette of blue and orange, the teenagers tell their stories in images, through the photographer’s lens.
Brimming with delicacy, 17 ans is a vibrant tribute to this paradoxical age, when the carefree spirit of childhood gives way to a new awareness of life, of self, of the world. A form of fragility, an uncertainty that is at its peak just as it is about to be shed like a skin to make way for an identity that is chosen, one that is about to be built and affirmed. It is an age when everything is charged with a particular emotional intensity because everything is at stake: every gesture, every word spoken, every choice of clothing… Every social outing becomes a moment where everything matters. The age of all possibilities — the moment we decide who we will be in the world.
Sophie Glasser – 17 ans
Published by Asiro Éditions, April 2025
Design: Studio Claire Huss
40 pages, 148 x 105 mm
300 copies, French and English editions
Available in bookstores and online
