“Working in pairs gives us increased reflexivity”

2023-08-05 14:30:04

Elsa & Johanna are two visual artist friends and French photographers. Since 2014, this duo has been settling in various territories and observing, for weeks on end, the gestures, attitudes and relationships that their inhabitants weave. This immersion work then allows them to forge characters that they interpret themselves in front of the lens. The result is fictional self-portraits that are both singular and strangely familiar.

Was your collaboration born of a friendship, or was it the other way around?

Elsa Parra : We met by chance – we were both doing an exchange year at the School of Visual Arts, a school of photography in New York. It was back-to-school day, and it was love at first sight. Very quickly, we did everything together, inside and especially outside the school. We already felt that we had fertile common ground on the side of the self-portrait, but without knowing yet what to do with it.

Johanna Benainous: What was a form of understanding, of mutual aid, became a real collaboration when, once back in France, we decided to go back together immediately to the United States for a project. This time it was very serious, it was about working, producing images. It went very well: traveling and living together, in a form of common movement, facilitated moments of creation for two.

Precisely, how do you work together?

J. B. : We had to invent our own creative process, because when we started working together, we didn’t have many examples of friendly duos around us. We first had to develop similar skills – being able to dress, make up, do our hair, manipulate light, take the picture – to be able to alternately fill each of these roles. It was important, first because we had few means, and then because it was essential to the construction of our common universe, this “third eye” which is neither Elsa’s nor mine, but ours. Ten years later, this common identity does exist, and we no longer need to think about it: we can more easily separate tasks, and take advantage of our differences.

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Is friendship an important subject in your photographic work?

E. P. : For our first project, the characters we created always went in pairs, and they were linked by a fictional relationship. In particular, we worked a lot on the theme of passing time and youth − inevitably, friendship was therefore at the heart of our narratives. It can be signified by gestures, as well as in the way of being photographed: the photographer then also becomes a character, and friendship can be read in the way the model poses.

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