Emmanuelle Bousquet

Nationality

French

Medium

Staged photography and self-portraiture; Polaroid processes

At Wild Project Gallery

WPG.04 Muses – Wild Project Gallery, Luxembourg (17 Mar – 23 Apr 2016)

Emmanuelle Bousquet is a French photographer working in staged self-portraiture and its proxies. She began photographing at ten, formed by a family milieu of fashion and couture in which she placed herself in front of the camera as naturally as the models around her; a 2004 encounter with the photographer Antoine d'Agata pushed her to treat the self-portrait as a full territory rather than a habit. Her recurring method is to work either with her own body or through chosen models — her "muses" — who carry her states for her.

The two series the Luxembourg record turns on are Muses and Statue. Muses was staged in the Théâtre du Boudoir des Muses, a private theatre built in 1796 under the Directoire and listed as a historic monument since 1972 — a building that has been a convent and later a brothel, and whose loaded interior gives the series its atmosphere of haunted performance. Statue is a body of Polaroid self-portraits in which Bousquet provokes deliberate chemical "accidents" — cracks, mold blooms, serrated edges — so that the material decay of the print becomes part of the figure. Both series were published together by Filigranes Éditions as Statue et Muses in 2015.

Wild Project Gallery presented Muses – Wild Project Gallery, Luxembourg (17 Mar – 23 Apr 2016), catalogued here as WPG.04; the gallery's archived pages documented both the Muses and Statue works. Coverage of Bousquet has otherwise been almost entirely French-language; the Journal carries an English-language account: Emmanuelle Bousquet: a profile in English.

Her recent work continues the conversation between fabric and flesh. Haute Couture (2020–2025), in which she sews her own body's image as a couturier sews cloth, appeared as a book from Éditions Bessard in 2024 and was presented during Paris Photo week in November 2024. In 2025 her work was shown at Galerie Basia Embiricos in Paris, in a monographic exhibition that October, and at Chaussée 36 in Berlin.