`Deux temps de lecture'

Abstract

This paper explores the process and practice of inscription and impression in the photographic works of Natacha Lesueur. It suggests that while Lesueur engages with the idiom of the fashion photograph, this is to subvert rather than affirm the genre. Her photographs play with and speak to the nature of the photographic medium itself (which is time-based, materially ephemeral and, in the popular consciousness, linked with stereotypical portrayals of the female subject). They serve to show, like Cindy Sherman's work, that the stereotype and essential femininities are constructed in the act of looking, rather than in the act of representation. Finally, it proposes that the epidermal inscriptions made on the skin ( pellicula) of Lesueur's models can be understood to function as a mise en abyme of the photographic process itself ( pellicule). This leads to the conclusion that Lesueur's practice seeks at once to un-frame the real and to articulate identity as event.