© Vincent Ferrané, Visitor, Libraryman 2018. Zoé de Soumagnat
© Vincent Ferrané, Visitor, Libraryman 2018. Zoé de Soumagnat

“Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?”

Visitor by Vincent Ferrané (b. 1974, French) is a series of photographs of women artists in their studio in Paris. The artist atelier is not just any space. Often secret, intimate and complex, it is a zone of freedom and experimentation but also of hard work and doubts; a place of « mise en abyme » for the artist and the work of art, where every detail can make sense. For women artists, things have changed for the better since Linda Nochlin’s scathing statement on art history and institutions in her 1971 pioneering essay Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? However, being sometimes in the majority in art schools, women artists are still under-represented in the art world in 2018.

Vincent Ferrané, Visitor, Libraryman 2018. Julie Beaufils bookcover
© Vincent Ferrané, Visitor, Libraryman 2018. Julie Beaufils

Visitor strives to find the right distance to capture the mystery, extreme tension and commitment of artistic work. The corpus of images are based on the subtle balance of portraits of women artists who are not in an archetypal representation but who can be guessed by touches through their process, gestures, tools, and the relation between their body and the piece of art that they are creating.

copyright Vincent Ferrané, Visitor, Libraryman 2018. Maude Maris
© Vincent Ferrané, Visitor, Libraryman 2018. Maude Maris

Can being a woman be considered as one element among others; sometimes essential, especially for the artists who have strategically chosen to place it as the center of their creation— sometimes secondary or incidental? Stepping aside from an idea of a curation under the main criterion of being a woman or a gender study, Visitor invites to discover the space and the precious time of the creation contained in a work in progress—to observe what makes history in the studio of these seventeen women artists.

copyright Vincent Ferrané, Visitor, Libraryman 2018. Sarah Trouche and a dancer
© Vincent Ferrané, Visitor, Libraryman 2018. Sarah Trouche and a dancer

In order of appearance: Amélie Bertrand, Apolonia Sokol, Caroline Corbasson, Chloé Quenum, Eva Nielsen, Georgia Russell, Jeanne Briand, Jennifer Caubet, Julie Beaufils, Lucille Uhlrich, Marion Verboom, Mathilde Denize, Maude Maris, Mimosa Echard, Mireille Blanc, Sarah Trouche and Zoé de Soumagnat. The portrayed artists are all part of the emerging art scene and work in Paris within varied artistic practices, such as painting, sculpture, installation, performance, etc.

copyright Vincent Ferrané, Visitor, Libraryman 2018. Zoé de Soumagnat
© Vincent Ferrané, Visitor, Libraryman 2018. Zoé de Soumagnat

About Vincent Ferrané

Born in 1974 in Créteil, Vincent Ferrané lives and works in Paris. After studying science, he turned to photography in 2004. He regularly works for French and international press magazines such as Les Inrockuptibles, Télérama, ELLE, Grazia and Vanity Fair. He is part of the agency Modds with which he works in assignments in portraits and advertising. In parallel to this work, he develops personal projects, where the real adorned with signs opens to symbolic and sensitive interpretations. In 2015, his project Bienvenueconsists of making a film from which he draws photograms to invent a new story. It was the subject of a solo exhibition during Les Rencontres de la photographie of Arles in La Commanderie Sainte Luce.

In 2017, Libraryman published Milky Waya series of pictures of his wife and child during breastfeeding. This book has been largely greeted by the international press and selected in several photo festivals (2018 Athens Photo Festival, 2018 Triennal of Photography in Hamburg).

Visitor by Vincent Ferrané, September 2018

Published in Stockholm, Sweden by Libraryman