Laura Stevens - Tu oublieras aussi

One of France’s most solicited portrait photographers, in her personal projects Stevens explores a resolutely feminine and contemporary point of view of the private sphere, questioning notions of desire, the passing of time, solitude and loss, the connection between the artist and her subject. For her first exhibition at Galerie Miranda, Corps d'hommes (2020), Stevens presented her perspective on the male nude, photographed in the private space of her Paris apartment bedroom. For this second exhibition, she pursues her questioning of the intimate sphere but this time considers two bodies, lovers, and what binds them, asking herself the question of the memory of desire and how to represent it.

Until now, the history of erotic photography has largely been written by and for men (Araki, Newton, Molinier, Mapplethorpe...), for the most part with explicit and performative images within a dominant- dominated framework. Several women photographers have made a mark in this territory but in general with a transgressive or militant posture (Krull, Natalia L, Ionesco, Cahun) that doesn’t fundamentally offer an alternative to the status quo. Fortunately, the list is longer of landmark women artists in other fields of photography - documentary, conceptual and experimental.

Confronted by the weight of these historical signatures, Laura Stevens quietly follows her own path, one that is feminine, free and egalitarian. In the tradition of Anglo-Saxon women photographers of the private sphere, such as Jo Ann Callis, Nan Goldin, Lise Sarfati and Mona Kuhn, Laura Stevens proposes a sensual and considered universe in color with compositions whose hushed ambiance betray an emotional and erotic tension. Her cinematographic images express the interstices of desire, unfinished moments. The new exhibition at Galerie Miranda is thus conceived like a series of film stills, fragmented memories of a precise moment, real or dreamed: a place, a gesture, a shaft of light, a movement. Nature is present, reminding us of our infinite smallness. Bodies are shown simply; desire is everywhere yet invisible.

As she left Casanova once and for all, Henriette, his great love, scratched on a carriage window with a diamond ring the phrase "You will also forget". Tattooed on the arm of Laura Stevens’ lover, the phrase reminds her of the essential paradox of desire: both written on our skin and destined to be forgotten.

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