Before raising our eyes, we are required to undo our visual education: a tradition of naked, seductive, weary, offered female bodies. For a long time, the photographer has worked entirely in the representation of a female body made synonymous with desire, and that adheres to adjectives such as plumpy, smooth, sensual. In her relationship to the body, the photographer Lucile Boiron embraces another theory, that of the "female gaze". This “gaze” proposes to expand the vocabulary of imagery associated with women's bodies, extracting itself from the stereotypes imposed by the heritage of the masculine gaze.
Before looking down, afflicted by contrary emotions of embarrassment and attraction, we will apprehend the sometimes difficult exercise of maintaining our gaze on a bloodstain, an operating table, a gut. Occulted body states, frozen in a desired flesh by postures or situations of displeasure. Inert envelopes and living substances. Sometimes milky bodies, sometimes bloody. The faceless flesh of Lucile Boiron is both divine and ungrateful: the body is decomposed into as many body parcels as objects of fascination, associated in the images of flower or animal metaphors.
Before looking down, we must put ourselves inside their skin. To live with the undulations of the flesh, their biological experiences, the imprints of the years. To go beyond the luminous, saturated, satiny colors which seduce the first glance, betraying the second, which discovers the raw reality of impure bodies.
Some bodies would like to adapt to standardized anatomy, to be molded in a beautiful plastic by a process of dissection. Some, like the writer Annie Ernaux, say that they wished "to escape a humiliating and unimportant body". Some, like the philosopher Michel Foucault, will say that they wished to build utopias of bodies in other bodies, which can be animated and lived in new spaces named "heterotopias". With great fragility, Lucile Boiron exposes these precious bodies under pressure.
