she who must not be named

— a name doesn’t define who you should be, and certainly not who you are. Interview with Private In Public, a person who defines herself by who she is rather than what she’s told to be.

February 22, 2021

Describe yourself in three words.

Demanding, introverted and fabulous.

Can you define your character?

I think I’d start by saying that my character is simply an expression of everything I bottled up during my childhood and adolescence — the feminine side that my family didn’t want to acknowledge and that I nourished all by myself. For as long as I can remember, I’ve always been fascinated by the archetype of the action woman in a figure-hugging catsuit who leaps agilely over rooftops doing the splits as she does so. Like many people in my generation, I watched Cat's Eye and that struck a chord with me, both visually and spiritually. My character has always remained grounded in the features of those “cartoonlike” heroines with impossible curves and outfits, who flirt with fetichism, and fearlessly take on any obstacles that cross their path. Later on, retrofuturism began to filter into my visual repertoire and it’s actually my current obsession, as I’m fascinated by the past and also by our limited vision of the future.

Can you tell us about your career path?

Photography has been part of my life since my adolescence in Normandy. Since I was 13 or perhaps 14, I’ve not stopped doing self-portraits. There’s something very liberating about working on an imaginary vision of yourself, especially for an introverted extrovert. I’ve never really been any good at facing the reality of life and I guess that’s the main reason I use self-portraits as a form of escapism. I’m always looking for fantasy. I didn’t actually study photography, I am entirely self-taught, from taking shots, (often) through photomontage to retouching. Drag came into my life much later in the middle of the 2010s. It took me a while to get things off the ground because of a lack of resources (there was no way I was going to start out without having all the basic equipment) but also of know-how. Drag requires a lot of discipline to achieve a satisfactory result and I’m always trying to develop the look, as is everyone else. It makes me shudder too to see a self-portrait of me in drag six months ago, and my current portraits will probably have the same effect six months from now.

Why appear as a man and in drag on your Instagram profile?

Honestly? I think I got the idea for that series at the beginning of lockdown. Like many people, I wasn’t feeling particularly motivated, and I was looking for something fun to do. I just wanted to have a ball on Photoshop while doing something that directly mirrored exactly what drag implies — that gender is just an illusion.