Emilie Hallard (1979, France) lives and works in Barcelona, Spain. She first worked with a diary-based approach focusing on people and nightlife with an intimate, moody and sensual dialogue before moving on to a more straightforward approach. Nowadays, she is interested in intersectional feminism, vulnerability, gender studies, and different representations of the body. She has also started a study on arid landscapes.
Hallard took part in different group exhibitions and photo festivals in France, Spain, Tunisia and Switzerland. Her work has been published several times in specialized photography web-zines. Her passion for photography led her to curatorship and publishing activities (Maria Inc.), to work as an interpreter for the Rencontres d’Arles, photographer Antoine d’Agata, and as an assistant at the Galerie Michèle Chomette in Paris. She is now part of the Spanish mixed feminist collective ‘No Sin Fotógrafas.’
Her latest book, Les corps incorruptibles, has just been published by Maria Inc.
Les corps incorruptibles
It’s 2019 and our bodies are still political. The 21st century still drags on with the same beauty standards of the last century – those of a young, white, thin, ethereal and heterosexual woman. Beauty, or rather a woman’s first commercial asset; is a passport to a happy marriage, professional success and social recognition. Both women and men are bombarded with an infinite amount of photoshopped images, which has alienated them and also driven them on a search for ideal beauty. This claustrophobic and impossible standard has only lead us to eternal comparison, frustration and levels of self-hatred. A blinded population starved by its regimes, which becomes terribly tractable and obedient.
Refusing the norm is to choose, as from the vulnerable side as the enthusiastic one, to be incorruptible, faithful to oneself, honest, punk in front of a capitalist system that fathers monstrous children of uniformity and consumerism, all made from the same postcolonial and patriarchal mold.
The artist refused the norm. She cherished and desired bodies of all ages, sizes, genders and colours, with intent to deconstruct beauty standards, beginning a quest for honesty, empowerment, acceptance and self-confidence, while gathering the words of my peers and taking a tender look at them.
These incorruptible bodies are a celebration of the diverse, the unlikely, the ambiguous, the androgynous, the non-obvious and the non-binary.
Les corps incorruptibles is a feminist, queer and anti-racist declaration of love.
To view more of Emilie Hallard’s work please visit her website.