French photographer Irina Ionesco, known for her fascinating female portraits in black and white in atmospheres suspended between surrealism and decadence, controversial at the time for her scandalous hypersexualized shots of her very young daughter, died at dawn on Monday 25 July at age 91 at the Rothschild hospital in Paris.
Celebrated in the 70s for her essential aesthetic, with her shots published everywhere in the press, from “Photo” to “Playboy” to “Vogue”, elected Photographer of the Year for “Photography Year BooK” in 1977, Irina Ionesco at the early 1980s ends up at the center of repeated attacks for nude photos taken of her daughter Eva since the age of five to six. In 2012, actress, director and model Eva Ionesco filed a court case against her mother for the nude photos he had taken of her up to the age of 12 (“she ruined my childhood”, she accused): the trial ended with the withdrawal of the images published in several books and a compensation of 10,000 euros.
The announcement of the disappearance was given by Eva Ionesco herself, 57, to the French newspaper “Libération” with a statement: “I would like us to remember that my mother was also a great photographer, who always worked in an inventive and artisanal way, which he mainly photographed models, women he met on the street and who weren’t models. Often these women didn’t like each other, they felt bad about themselves and were happy to be looked at and transfigured by my mother “.
Born in Paris to Romanian parents on September 3, 1930, after her studies in Romania, Irina Ionesco returned to the French capital, where she had lived permanently since 1946. Very young, she studied as a dancer and performed with various companies until 1958, when she fell ill and she was forced to leave the stage. She began to paint and as the only theme she represented empty rooms. She became romantically involved with the artist of the Cobra group Guillaume Corneille (Cornelis Van Beverloo), who gave her a Nikon camera at Christmas 1964. Since then she has decided to portray the women she met and her daughter, little Eva.
The theatrical, redundant and baroque style of Irene Ionesco, combined with her totally anti-historical interpretation of the woman, whose overwhelming seductive charm she exalted in full she was a feminist, made her a true initiator, to whom several greats of photography, starting with Joel Peter Witkin, they owe a lot. Her black and white portraits of her were affected by her cultural matrices: the surrealism of her friend André Breton, symbolist painting, the symbols of decadence, the theatricality of a false lust.
While remaining tied to the artistic world, she has worked in the field of fashion publishing, starting from 1978, in the magazine “Mode International”.
(by Paolo Martini)