Snails: The Nymphs of Freshwater

My early photographic experiments at the lakes remind me of imagery featuring nymphs. In Renaissance and Pre-Raphaelite painting, they represent an allegorical idea (alongside goddesses and water nymphs) and evoke a fantasy that blends sensuality, desire, and eroticism on the one hand—and purity, virginity, and veneration on the other. 

The community of painters—predominantly male—imposes a one-sided perspective, a gaze focused solely on what fascinates them: a woman’s beauty and the desire she arouses. The nymphs depicted by John Waterhouse, William Bouguereau, and Cavalier d’Arpin are fragile, dependent, passive, submissive, and devoted to men’s pleasure.

This legacy has never truly faded from the collective imagination. It continues to influence us.

"Limnées" is defined as an attempt to reclaim the gaze. I draw on the classical aesthetic codes of the great painters while adopting a feminine perspective. The body as object becomes the body as subject. It is a body that thinks and acts. I depict it as embodied, endowed with emotions and intentions. I strive to restore the body’s vitality, its uniqueness, its multiplicity, and its complexity.

For *Limnées*, I’ve chosen not to select the people I photograph. All of them reached out to me through public calls for participation (posters in the streets and stores, social media posts). I have only one requirement: that they identify as female. As for the rest, I believe that everyone has the right to experience what it’s like to be a nymph.

These people don’t even know each other that very morning. Yet they are united by a bond and a strength whose exact origin I cannot pinpoint. In my conversations with the people I photograph, I’ve noticed that as they seek to free themselves from their constraints, they all go through ambivalent states: struggles, suffering, loss of identity, hope, or  a sense of peace. I  stage these transformations and attempt to capture their evolving and unfinished nature.