BETWEEN MIRRORS Les Audacieuses

A fashion-documentary project blending staged portraiture with the social realities of young women in Mantes-la-Jolie, France. Through collaborative image-making, fashion becomes a tool for self-expression, identity and reinvention.

BETWEEN MIRRORS / Les Audacieuses

Between Mirrors explores photography as a space where identity is performed and reinvented. Created through collaborative photographic encounters with young women in Mantes-la-Jolie, on the outskirts of Paris, the project moves between portraiture, performance and fiction to ask a simple question: who do we become when we are given the possibility of imagining ourselves differently?

Developed within Les Audacieuses, a programme supporting young women navigating periods of personal reconstruction, the series emerged through a process of shared image-making. The participants chose their clothes and objects, bringing crowns, mannequins, mirrors and other props available at the facility into the frame. These elements become more than accessories. They act as extensions of the imagination, allowing identities to be tried on, transformed and reimagined.

A crown can suggest authority or aspiration. A safety-training mannequin becomes both a double and an uncanny reflection. A mirror divides the self into observer and observed. Elsewhere, a window opens onto the landscape of the Parisian banlieue, placing private acts of self-invention within a wider geography of belonging, visibility and social expectation.

My approach draws on two decades of working in fashion, portraiture and editorial photography, where image-making has always involved a negotiation between the person in front of the camera and the identity constructed within the frame. Here, that relationship becomes the subject itself. Rather than treating the camera as a tool for documenting other people's lives, I use it as a collaborative space in which the women participate in shaping how they are seen.

The work resists a linear narrative of vulnerability followed by recovery. Identity is neither fixed nor neatly resolved. It remains contradictory, playful, aspirational and unfinished. The photographs move between intimacy and performance, staged encounters and moments of observation, allowing these different registers to coexist.

Between Mirrors considers self-representation not as the discovery of an authentic image hidden beneath appearances, but as an ongoing act of becoming. In the space between the person, the reflection and the image, another version of the self becomes possible.