Sorties No.1 This is not just an image. This is not a just image

Sorties critiques how images of women, shaped by a male gaze, reproduce power through representation. Rejecting rigid gender binaries, it embraces “rich” and “poor” images and aligns with hybrid, marginalised figures resisting dominant ways of seeing.

Project Description

Sorties’ first issue, titled This Is Not Just an Image. This Is Not Just an Image, explores how images of women are historically shaped by a male-dominated gaze that positions women as objects of desire. By questioning whether framing gender through oppositional binaries reinforces these very power structures, representation is shown to be non-neutral, as images repeat and reshape meanings already embedded within cultural and ideological systems. The issue embraces both “rich” and “poor” images as politically charged forms that reflect contemporary contradictions and modes of circulation. The issue ultimately aligns with hybrid and marginalised female-bodied figures that resist fixed identities and dominant ways of seeing.

Artistic and Research Context

Sorties No. 1 is the first pocket-format artist’s book in a series of gender-led and feminist explorations of visual culture, collective identity, and historical representation, published by Action Motion Press. In this inaugural issue, a decade-long research into iconic imagery collides and takes shape as a continuous narrative, unfolding through a constellation of sub-themes and intertwined histories. The book engages with subjects such as birth and motherhood, beauty and representation, witchcraft, ugliness and refusal, holiness, and more.

Format and Production

Printed in a limited edition of 500 copies, Sorties is produced in black and white, with two special colours on the cover, printed in 6 design variants. The book measures 90 × 125 mm, has a 16 mm spine, and contains approximately 352 images across 360 pages.

About the Project

Sorties is a living bulletin, one with an organic yet periodic cadence. Yet, as a bulletin—a “sealed” notice—we find ourselves returning to the roots and truths of the word itself, where bulla first referred to a swelling or a rounded form, an inflation or a knob, a proliferation of bumps and blisters. Sorties is, in this sense, a swelling of sorts: its initial form an accumulation of infested, infected iconography; depictions saturated with a masculine narrative, a sense of history extensively patriarchal. Sorties is both a collection of stories and a series of counter-responses. There is strategy, and there is an unknown journey set in motion; the two are intertwined, completing one another, never mutually exclusive.

Extract from the text

...We’re at war. When meanings are organised into opposites and binaries, oppressive systems thrive – male/female, black/white, gay/straight. Our bodies are being called to account and they are ‘differently implicated, depending on how meaning is given and taken, constructed and interpreted’. These imposed meanings reflect and engage ‘our fears and fantasies, the sentiments of desire and revulsion, of ambivalence and aggression’. Terminology here is important. If we examine the word ‘representation’, its main body ‘presentation’ stems from a showcase, an exhibition, something to be looked at, perhaps admired. A gift. Whereas, its head, the ‘re’ of repetition, with a mutating transformative nature, speaks of the un-neutrality of something holding ‘a meaning that is already there’. To represent therefore is to resurface something within a pre-existing power structure. To be represented then is entrusting that someone will follow this process fairly as they stand in for you. When you look at the images within this issue, it is important to question where these representations have come from. Some may be described as ‘rich’ – they have been painted, carved, etched. While others may be labelled as ‘poor’ – multiplied and copied, expressing ‘all the contradictions of the contemporary crowd: its opportunism, narcissism, desire for autonomy and creation’. In these pages there are ‘strange unfamiliar shapes, freakish bodies, disquieting forms and hybrid creatures’. One can witness monsters and muses, saints and sinners, life givers or takers, the “foul” and the “beautiful”.  This issue stands with the mutant, muted, memeified female-bodied beings. These are not just images – they tell, they show, they echo, they witness, they shape, they return, they hold – they are heavy.