For this week’s issue, Lise Sarfati photographed the concert pianist Hélène Grimaud for D. T. Max’s Profile; earlier this year, Sarfati photographed the feminist writer Élisabeth Badinter for Jane Kramer’s Profile. “Even through Élisabeth did not like to have her photograph taken, she opened her world to me,” Sarfati told me. “Hélène was different: a sort of star in the sky. Right away she was more distant and enigmatic.”
To my eye, these two intimate views echoed Sarfati’s portraits of the four women in her recently completed body of work “She.” Sarfati photographed Christine, her sister Gina, and Christine’s two daughters Sloane and Sasha over the course of four years, in California and Arizona. “Each woman is photographed alone and acts like a mirror to the others or to herself,” Sarfati said. “I was interested in Christine’s instability, Sasha’s melancholy, Sloane’s capacity for transformation, and Gina’s gender ambiguity.” Here’s a selection from her forthcoming book, to be published by Twin Palms this fall. Sarfati will have two solo exhibitions at Rose Gallery, Los Angeles, in spring 2012, and a retrospective at Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, in 2014. Her work can also be seen in Rose Gallery’s booth at Paris Photo this November.
