catalogue Spring 2012 - exhibitions international

shoebox studio
stéphane coutelle
photography
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Stéphane Coutelle
Shoebox Studio
Introduction by Camille Saint-Jacques
23 x 28 cm. 9 x 11 inches
Pgs. 128 ill. 120
Hardback with slipcase
English
Release date Spring 2012
Rights world
Usd 50.00 GbP 30.00
ISBN > 978-88-6208-197-9
These aspiring models have flown in from all over the world to
Paris, the ogre city, where the quest for beauty feeds on new faces.
Soon, these uprooted girls will be transformed into sophisticated
creatures of universal glamour. Stéphane Coutelle, the
renowned beauty photographer, will be one of the architects of
this transformation. But by receiving them in the Shoebox Studio
during the first days of their Parisian stay for a brief session,
unencumbered by any strict production objectives, Coutelle
pays tribute to their identity and their peculiarity, both perhaps
even more short-lived than their youth. This first meeting aims
to capture a psychology, a past, before professional reflexes can
take hold, before any complicity is established. The artist acts
here without preconceived ideas, open to everything. The situation
is not the conventional one of the artist and his model.
The girls’ looks carry questioning, expectations, but determination
as well. They know their fate will unwind behind the
closed doors of shooting sessions, and that there will be little
time to learn the rules of the game …Coutelle’s portraits sometimes
trouble us. We could attribute this disconcertment to a
kind of harshness or voyeurism on behalf of the photographer.
But in reality, these images express a certain solidarity; it is not
Coutelle himself who is unrelenting, but the world in which
both the artist and his model evolve. Shoebox Studio is a major
project because the portraits lead us from a private, individual
psychology to the contemporary human condition in which the
need to be seen and recognized has become a global quest, a
social phenomenon.
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