Julieta Sans – Well Read

www.julietasans.com and previously featured

“This is a series of staged portraits of characters from a fictional book chosen by each model, be it a novel, a poem or a children’s story. The story is up to the spectators’ imaginations, giving place to myriad possible interpretations.

These are images of real people in a gently directed but controlled performance: but why have these people chosen these characters and what is the story behind the image? Can we partly guess someone’s traits and story in a portrait, let alone a staged one?

Julia – Du Coté de Chez Swann, Marcel Proust

Tom & Daniel – Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain

Lolo – Mimi Cracra, Agnés Rosenthal

The project also explores the notion that there are as many interpretations of a portrait as there are spectators, as there are of a book by its different readers. In the words of Roland Barthes in The Death of the Author: ‘there is one place where this multiplicity [of a text] is focused and that place is the reader, not the author.’

As we overlay our own experiences and identities with the narrative, a multiplicity of new stories are thrown into existence, and the same can be said of the ways in which we “read” a photographic portrait: Well Read celebrates fiction and the impossibility of an accurate representation in photography, the difference between the image someone thinks they project and the images we construct of one another.”

Aurélie – My Dog Stupid, John Fante

Patricio, The Gashlycrumb Tinies, Edward Gorey

Mora – L’écume des Jours, Boris Vian

Series of 15 photographs 50 x 50 cm printed on Fujiflex, mounted on dibond. Installation includes original books to leaf through.
More images and other interesting projects on Julieta Sans’ website.