On the occasion of this edition of Paris Photo, the gallery Les filles du calvaire presents a dialogue between the works of Todd Hido, Kourtney Roy, Charles Fréger, and Karen Knorr, structured around the notions of portrait, silhouette, and the staging of presence. These three paradigms, central to each artist’s practice, become the vehicles of an unstable presence—at times clearly embodied, at others only perceptible through light, shadow, or trace. Between apparition, staging, and withdrawal, the works explore the thresholds of the visible and the ways in which the subject is constructed within the image.
Through their respective practices, these artists investigate the multiple modalities of human representation, often at the boundary between fiction and reality. In Todd Hido’s work, the figure appears fragmented, elusive, sometimes reduced to a diffuse presence within nocturnal landscapes or interiors bathed in uncertain light. Kourtney Roy, for her part, engages in performative self-portraiture, playing with stylized silhouettes and cinematic stagings in which identity slips behind the mask and the role.
Charles Fréger’s typological portraits question the social and cultural constructions of the individual through costume and uniform, transforming bodies into signs, into almost sculptural silhouettes. Finally, Karen Knorr composes images in which human presence, sometimes replaced or extended by the animal, interacts with historically charged spaces, orchestrating a subtle staging of visible and invisible hierarchies.
The figure reveals itself even as it conceals itself; shadow becomes a narrative space in its own right, and light acts both as a revealer and as a veil. On the occasion of the bicentenary of the invention of photography, this proposal takes on particular resonance: from its very beginnings, the medium has been built on plays of light and shadow, explorations that these artists continue here, renewing the forms and narratives of the visible.
