Aglaé Bory – Autoportrait avec enfant, série Corrélations, 2014

Aglaé Bory’s photographic work revolves around the human face — portraits of friends and family or strangers — and landscapes, whether real and geographical or interior and metaphorical. Both genres are part of the same poetic gesture: to make visible the uniqueness and intimacy of a person or a place, to establish, in the words of the artist, a “silent conversation, in search of authentic interiority”. Somewhere between documentary and fiction, her work interrogates the absence or presence of faces in the environment, and the way in which bodies occupy space.

Autoportrait avec enfant (“Self-portrait with child”) belongs to Aglaé Bory’s series Corrélations, which reveals the everyday (non-)events of a woman who lives alone with her daughter — from going for a walk to taking a bath, from tea-time to homework. Aglaé Bory’s photos capture looks and attitudes that coincide or contradict ; they explore the ambivalence of family relationships and the ties between mother and child. These are not snapshots of private life but images that have been carefully and precisely staged, even though they evoke actions and emotions from the collective imagination. Operated by the artist, the black shutter release cord is a signal to the viewer that they are invited observers of these intimate scenes.