Martine Fougeron – Tête-à-Tête
“Tête-à-Tête is a series of intimate portraits of the photographer’s two adolescent sons and their friends in New York and in France. It spans the period of the boys’ adolescence between the ages of 13 and 18. The series, naturally observed, is a face-to-face engagement of the mother-photographer with the private world of two brothers and their teen tribe. The work explores adolescence as a liminal state, between childhood and adulthood, between the feminine and the masculine, and between innocence and a burgeoning self-identity. The focus is on the adolescents’ heightened states of minds. Fougeron’s inspiration for the series derived from Dutch painting, especially Vermeer’s mysterious domestic scenes, and she was also influenced by cinema, with particular regard for the dramatic effects of set lighting and mise-en-scène.
Curator and critic Charlotte Cotton has called Tête-à-Tête “one of the best biographical stories that photography has crafted in the 2000s.”
more images on Martine Fougeron’s website