Paris is never short of exhibitions competing for our attention, but some deserve a proper last-minute dash across the city. Closing this Sunday, September 13, Camille Vivier’s first retrospective at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie is one of them. Bringing together almost one hundred works from more than twenty-five years, the show offers a rare chance to enter the French photographer’s strange, sensual and meticulously constructed universe.
Vivier has always moved comfortably between fashion and fine art, without treating either as the other’s lesser sibling. After studying in Grenoble and at Central Saint Martins, she worked as an assistant at Purple in the late 1990s, before building an editorial career that has taken her to publications including i-D, Dazed & Confused, AnOther Magazine and The New Yorker. Yet her images resist the clean fantasy often associated with fashion photography. Bodies become sculptures; objects appear almost alive; beauty arrives with a slight sense of danger.
Curated by Victoria Arescheva, the exhibition unfolds thematically across around ten series, combining gelatin silver and digital prints, Polaroids and works conceived especially for the occasion. At its centre is Vivier’s representation of women, particularly the nude, informed by fine art, literature, comics, pop culture, underground scenes and early Hollywood. Her portraits of female bodybuilders—including Sophie, Tjiki and Deborah—push back against passive ideas of femininity.
Around them, Vivier places a cast of uncanny counterparts: votive candles, modernist puppets, monumental public sculptures and the biomechanical sets H.R. Giger created for Ridley Scott’s Alien. The resulting encounters blur the line between flesh and matter, the animate and the inanimate, attraction and unease.
If you have time this weekend, it’s a plan you shouldn’t miss. Go for the fashion references, stay for the bodies that refuse to behave like images.
The exhibition by Camille Vivier is on view through September 13 at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, 5/7 Rue de Fourcy, Paris.
