Anne-Sophie Guillet is a French photographer born in Oxford, UK in 1987. She graduated in 2013 with an MFA in Visual arts & Photography from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels, Belgium. She currently lives and works in Brussels. Anne-Sophie Guillet received the Roger de Conynck/ foundation roi Baudouin prize in 2013 and got selected laureate of the ‘proposition d’artistes 2013’ at the Espace photographique Contretype in Brussels. She has exhibited in various places and has been part of the Mt Rokko International Photo Festival in the Emerging Photographers Show 2016, Kobe, JP. She went twice to a residency in rural Japan at Studio Kura during the summers 2016-17 and started a new body of work there. She is currently part of a group show at the contemporary art fair ‘Salon de Montrouge’ in Paris, FR.
Inner Self
Gender is liquid. The traditional ideas of what it means to be a man or a woman today keeps getting challenged by individuals who courageously defy stereotypes to affirm the more complex, nuanced nature of their sexual identity. In Inner Self, French photographer Anne-Sophie Guillet captures this aspect of contemporary societies through a series of simple, stripped down yet powerful portraits: ‘Body delineates an individual, it comes to confound itself with the external identity’. Anne-Sophie Guillet pays special attention to the randomicity of daily commutes, to androgynous people of an indistinct gender. Hers is a contemplative look, one open to experiencing reality as an ow, somewhere in the humidity of Japan’s late summer months. Far from fixed appearances, everything in her work is fluid, impermanent, and transitory. For many years now, the artist has shot around twenty portraits in medium format using natural light. Her subjects pose indoors against a neutral background. Inner Self developed through chance meetings with young unknowns who visibly escape the strict man/woman binary. Whether the effect is purely aesthetic or there are actual hormones at play, all of them heavily blur the lines of gender in some way. Taken head-on, their portraits seem draped in heavy silence; there is, however, nothing mute about them, instead something which seems to question how our very identities are constructed and perceived when faced with the Others’ gaze.
To view more of Anne-Sophie Guillet’s work please visit her website.