Benzine Cyprine

Benzine Cyprine is a long-term documentary (2014-2020) about a gang of women of the same name.

The initiative for this project was a pressing need to respond to an existential malaise around being female. How can we account for the insecurity resulting from the lust for the female body, often reduced to its erotic potential? How can we evoke the preconceptions that tend to maintain the female gender as vulnerable, infantile and depreciable? How can we question moralizing stereotypes about it? All this while avoiding assigning the status of victim by nature to women and without falling into pathos.

My response was to show a femininity that goes against the grain of the mawkish, complacent and hypersexual figures of women that saturated the media flows (big and small screens, the press, advertising). I then began to photograph symbols of a particular feminine identity that inspires both sensuality and virility. This symbolism is expressed through moments in the lives of a gang of women, their personalities and their attitudes.