The people in Lise Sarfati's pictures never seem to be doing much of anything. They hang out, smoke cigarettes, sit on their beds, pour themselves coffee. They are usually alone, and most of them are women. They seem to be waiting. Will something happen to amuse or interest them?

Sarfati is best known for her photographs of young people, mainly teenagers trying to figure out who they are, what they will do, where they will be. We sense in these pictures, as we often do with adolescents, that they are hiding themselves, concealing something, playing at being someone, even though Sarfati is open and sympathetic to them. Many of the young girls she photographs have made themselves up with ingenious and colorful makeup and hair, a disguise as much as an expression. Or they recline in their rooms like voluptuous odalisques-but privately, just for themselves. Hardly aware of the person making the pictures, they reveal an impenetrable languorousness that is beautiful and particular and also somehow unnerving.

Sarfati has said: “Perhaps adolescence is the only true time of life.” She has also stated: “I like doubles, like mothers and daughters, or sisters, or reflections. This represents my research in women's identity. . . . I am interested in fixing that instability.” What Sarfati calls her photographic “research” into the “instability” of women's identity has evolved in the course of three distinct projects, conceived as a totality. The first project, Immaculate (2006-07), looked at the rarefied world of Catholic girls' schools surrounded by gardens (“like Eden,” Sarfati notes). The children who attend these schools are protected in a kind of cultural bell jar; they seem strangely, even disturbingly untouched, and separated from the concerns of the world outside.

That bell jar cracks open in the next part of Sarfati's series, The New Life (2005), which examines a number of adolescents-both boys and girls-living in towns and cities across the United States. Among the subjects in this series are two sisters, Sloane and Sasha, who, when Sarfati first met them in 2003, were coping with a radical geographical, cultural, and psychological transition. They had recently moved to Oakland, California, from Phoenix, where they had lived with their grandparents in a large, conventional suburban home near their father, attending a rather proper school that required uniforms. Sarfati photographed the sisters' reinvented, unconventional lives with their mother in the Oakland loft.

What is perhaps most astonishing about the pictures of Sasha and Sloane in The New Life is that the girls are hardly recognizable as the same people, though according to Sarfati the photographs of them were nearly all taken on the same day. The most memorable picture-one of Sarfati's most recognized-is the portrait of Sloane in a long orange wig, wearing a brilliant red dress and enormous sunglasses, glancing downward. In another picture, again in the funky Oakland loft, she is blond and smokes a cigarette, looking at the photographer bemusedly, inquisitively.

Sarfati's current project, She, in a sense doubles the stakes of her investigation into familial pairings: it revisits the two sisters, now a few years older, alongside their mother, Christine, and her sister, Gina. Sloane and Sasha no longer live with their mother; now each girl shares an apartment with other roommates in Oakland. Gina too lives in Oakland, while Christine lives in Los Angeles, pursuing a singing career. Sarfati is careful to point out that though her two last series share two subjects, they are different projects. Here, no one is photographed with anyone else; everyone is seen alone, in her own space. Sarfati is interested in the implied drama enacted here between the two younger women and two older women. The mood of these pictures, in less expert or sensitive hands, might recall the emotional level of a soap operaone has the sense that the issues are ongoing, as they are on TV dramas. Though there are anxieties and real competitiveness manifested in the way they all dress and comport themselves, we also sense an emotional cohesion among these four women. They look as though they belong to the same tribe, will stick together, are conscious of one another, worry about one another.

As difficult as it is to tell who is who in the earlier pictures, it is perhaps even harder now. Not only do the two younger girls look different in almost every picture, the older women have slender, angular bodies, like the girls'. Christine, their dark-haired mother, can hardly be distinguished from her sister, Gina, who is naturally blond but wears a black wig. Christine has the same inward gaze and the same outward sense of costume her daughters have. The mother and the aunt have tattoos on their shoulders. Christine puts on a bridal dress for the camera, a costume she keeps even though she was never married in it. Like her children, the mother is shown in intense thought, caught up in her own imagination; we see her hesitating on the stairs between the house and the street, as though trying to remember something she has forgotten. Sarfati photographed Sloane sitting in a San Francisco home, holding up a toddler's one-piece wrap, examining it as though she is trying to find something in it. Sloane is at her first job, as a babysitter, and as she folds the clothes, seated on the floor with the light coming in from the window behind her, she seems older in her new blond hair than the self-conscious-looking young woman in red hair standing just inside a room in Oakland. Sarfati notes that Sloane's sister, Sasha, has a tattoo that reads “Mother” on her shoulder. So while it may seem that roles are malleable, that self-invention is not only possible but liberating, Sarfati finds the essential and perceptible links that weave these women together.

In her attention to dress and posture, Sarfati presents personality as a protean entity, as though you can change your mood, and who you think you are, with the same ease as you change your clothes. But there is also a kind of impenetrable core that resists change, and this torsion is what Sarfati finds especially telling. The girls can have pink hair or blond hair or dark hair-have they forgotten what color their hair really is? Sloane can look like Alice closing the door to her Wonderland room in her high-waisted blue dress, or have the sophistication and sexual tension of an older woman when she crawls over a bed in high heels or lounges on another bed, throwing her newly blond hair over so it glances the polished floor below. Perhaps it is not surprising that none of these women live in any of the spaces where they are photographed; none of these rooms is an actual home-instead, they are substitutes for what home represents. Sarfati is discreet: she is a friendly observer, not an imposing one. Not much is asked; not much is told. What she finds so expressive is the powerful psychological resonance of her subjects-so real and palpable it is almost like having another person in the room.

Sarfati is interested in the lives of people who live not in the biggest cities, but in smaller, less heroic ones, where life is slower. She finds it easier to get to know people in such places: they tend to be more open, more inviting, and she says she discovers a kind of parallel between her subjects and the places where they live, particularly in these relatively quiet places. Pictures in The New Life were made in Austin, Portland, New Orleans, and elsewhere. Sarfati is attracted to the appearance of “normalcy.” She observes that these places are unlike France, for instance, where architecture can dominate the people who live and work in grand spaces.

Sarfati grew up in Nice, on the Italian border, where summer tourists visit the beaches on the Mediterranean Sea. She lived for ten years in Russia, where she says she learned “the feeling of being nowhere in an undetermined territory.” She prefers the United States now, she says, because of its “immensity. Space is a condition to realize ourselves.” Since 2003 she has spent more than half of her time here. Sarfati observes: “I am interested in marginality, in immaturity, in naïveté, in illusion, in fictions, in transitions, in the fact that at a certain moment in life there is no limit. I would like my photography to pose a question rather than make a precise statement.” One cannot look at her pictures without thinking that Sarfati, like many Europeans, has been touched by an existentialist acquaintance with dread, loneliness, and other modern anxieties of the postwar period. When she was young she was part of a group that followed Guy Debord's Situationist ideas; she was interested in those who wrote about the immaturity of the culture, and who resisted the conventionality and authoritarianism of the prewar past: the Polish novelist Witold Gombrowicz, the German dramatist Frank Wedekind, the French poet Gérard de Nerval. Probably most important to her, however, was the writing of Julia Kristeva, the feminist, structuralist theorist who, as a psychoanalyst, is interested in developmental psychology, especially the ties between mothers and their daughters. Kristeva's 1989 book Black Sun is a meditation on depression and melancholia shared between mothers and daughters: she writes of this relationship both theoretically and poetically, referring to the 1853 Nerval poem “El Desdichado” (especially the phrase “le soleil noir de la Mélancolie”: “The Black Sun of Melancholia”).

Sarfati says: “I am not interested in psychology but I am interested in psychoanalysis.” She is responsive to tensions, to the situation itself-but it would be wrong to say that she is a romantic, or that she is interested in storytelling. She has found the people she photographs because they are compelling to her; she finds out about their lives later. “I am not interested in biographical details even if they could be informative,” she says. “Indeed, they are not central to my approach. When I started working with [these women], I was not aware of their family story and their relationships.”

Here in the United States we consider physical appearance to be mutable. Our popular culture is largely directed toward adolescents and at the same time is based on an ideal of perpetual adolescence: its tastes, its look. (How many aging rock stars do we need to see who persist in not growing up-who look and act like teenagers?) We also have come to believe-if you follow television or the Web-that much of what we want or miss in our lives can be satisfied by buying things, and for women, by buying things to adorn ourselves, to change or “enhance” our appearance. On the other hand, we seem not too interested in inquiry, or in poetry (although we are anxious about religion on some essential level). Sarfati's pictures, respectful and noninvasive, of these women and what they invisibly share are an imaginative meditation not only on who they are, but also on who we are-beyond what we look like and what we wear-what we bring to life and what we might expect of it.

Surtout ne pas prononcer le mot « fashion ». On arrive pourtant en voiture avec la styliste, le coffre rempli d'articles de mode, que l'on déballera plus tard, sous un soleil de plomb. On est de retour à Austin, Texas, en territoire connu, pas forcément toujours familier, mais les rues, les couleurs et les visages ont un air de déjà vu. On retrouve cette ville très particulière, avec ses codes, ses rites, et cette culture underground et teenager encore vivante. On y recroise des jeunes filles qui ont déjà posé devant votre objectif. Elles sont les mêmes, juste un peu plus âgées, certaines sur le point de sortir de l'adolescence, d'autres déjà femmes. Quelques unes sont parties - on ira même en photographier une jusqu'en Californie. Puis, au hasard des rencontres, des rues et des amitiés, on en découvrira de nouvelles, qui, à leur tour, deviendront vos modèles. C'est la même chose mais en un peu différent, comme un décalque légèrement modifié ce que l'on était venu faire, il y a cinq ans déjà, en 2003.

On ne parle jamais de mode donc. Manière de tenir à distance un univers dans lequel on ne se reconnait pas forcément, manière également de ne pas susciter trop d'attentes de la part des modèles, manière enfin et surtout de ne pas d'emblée définir un territoire avec ses stéréotypes et ses habitudes. Nommer ce serait déjà borner une pratique, la délimiter, la circonscrire. Il en est toujours allé ainsi avec Lise Sarfati. Celle-ci paraît réticente à mettre des mots sur sa démarche, sinon par la négative : ceci n'est pas de la photographie de mode précise t- elle. Alors qu'est-ce que c'est ? Des portraits en pied ? Pourquoi-pas ? L'inexpressivité des modèles ne doit pas cacher la dimension sociologique de ces images, comme le contenu psychologique que chacune d'elles contient. Mais le terme est trop connoté esthétiquement, trop lié à d'autres champs artistiques et d'autres pratiques plus anciennes pour être employé ici à bon escient. Des « figures» alors au sens où l'on pouvait parler autrefois de « d'études de figures », distincte d'autres genres ? Le terme serait peut -être plus juste : chacune de ces images enregistre littéralement la distance d'un corps à l'espace qui l'entoure et, ce faisant, construit, de manière métaphorique et très consciente cette fois-ci, un rapport du modèle au monde qui l'entoure. Qu'ils soient pris à Moscou, Ikcha, Saint Petersbourg, Vilnius, Berkeley, Oakland ou Austin, ces clichés d'adolescent disent, dans la chorégraphie des corps, un décalage au monde. Evident ou suggéré, ludique, douloureux ou indifférent, ce dernier, qui confine souvent à une certaine absence au monde, est commun à tous les modèles : il semble désigner l'adolescent (et ici il serait plus juste de parler d'adolescente) comme un être en constant devenir, rétif à toute tentative de fixation et face auquel l'acte d'enregistrement photographique relève définitivement de la gageure.

Toutes ces jeunes filles sont à la fois dans l'ici de la prise de vue et dans un ailleurs indéfinissable. Cette ubiquité fondamentale est, à mon sens, à la source de l'intérêt que Lise Sarfati porte à ses jeunes modèles. Celle-ci aime à citer Gombrowicz et l'attachement de ce dernier à la notion d'immaturité : la révolte sourde, le refus muet, le jeu avec la vie et la réalité, et surtout l'idée d'un sujet informe à la fois malléable et pourtant insaisissable - qui finira toujours par se dérober. L'idée donc de l'adolescence comme un territoire que l'on a tous exploré et qui pourtant nous est désormais hors d'atteinte et de compréhension. Si tout portrait peut être envisagé comme l'affrontement de divers moi (le moi social, le moi intime, on pense aux mots de Barthes : « devant l'objectif je suis à la fois celui que je crois et celui que je voudrais que l'on me croie »), cet affrontement prend avec le modèle adolescent une dimension exceptionnelle.

Cette dimension essentielle, présente dans ses séries antérieures, se retrouve également dans cette série-ci. Nous ne sommes pas ici dans un travail avec des modèles amateurs réalisée au nom d'une recherche d'une quelconque vérité - celle d'une « vraie vie » qui s'opposerait au monde, censément artificiel, de la mode. La chose a été déjà été tentée cent fois, parfois avec succès, et la refaire ne présenterait finalement que de peu d'intérêt. Ce qui retient ici bien davantage l'attention est le lien interne très étroit, très fort que ce nouvel ensemble d'images entretient avec les images précédentes de Lise Sarfati et plus particulièrement justement celles réalisées dans diverses villes des Etats-Unis dont Austin et publiées dans l'ouvrage La vie nouvelle en 2005. Ce qui attire le regard et suscite l'interrogation au premier chef est bien cette proximité : le sentiment curieux que, chargée de ce Fashion Magazine, Lise Sarfati, serait, consciemment, retournée sur les lieux mêmes de ses précédentes photographies, pour refaire la même chose qu'il y a cinq ans. Comme une lancinante impression de redite et de bégaiement : regarder ces images c'est comme faire l'expérience de retrouver quelqu'un qu'il nous semble reconnaître tout en percevant confusément que, derrière cette apparente familiarité, un minime changement est survenu dans sa physionomie.

Car ce ne sont pas tout à fait les mêmes. Non seulement bien évidemment parce que cette répétition à l'identique est impossible. Les anciens modèles ont vieilli et changé, de nouvelles les ont remplacées, d''autres cadres et d'autres intérieurs ont succédé aux anciens. Mais aussi parce que la méthode de Lise Sarfati s'est également légèrement infléchie. L'adolescence est une période où l'on ne cesse de jouer des rôles, d'être traversé par des identités. multiples et contradictoires, fugaces, différentes selon les interlocuteurs et parfois très contrastées. L'insincérité est le propre de l'adolescent(e) et le vêtement un de ses modes d'expression privilégiés. Lise Sarfati le sait et en joue. Coulées dans de nouveaux vêtements, les modèles ne s'appartiennent plus totalement. Elles jouent désormais, sans doute un peu plus aujourd'hui qu'autrefois. Cette paire de chaussures, cette blouse, cette robe, les fait entrer dans la peau d'une autre, les dédouble. L'intérêt porté à la figure du double, présente par le biais des miroirs aux reflets narcissiques comme par la présence du motif des soeurs, accentue, au sein de nombre d'images, cette impression de décalque et de redoublement.

Malgré la distance, géographique et temporelle qui sépare le travail de Lise Sarfati de celui de la photographe victorienne Lady Hawarden et de ses tableaux vivants au contenu indéterminé réalisé dans son appartement londonien dans les années 1850, on ne peut s'empêcher de dresser des parallèles. L'une comme l'autre, à l'aide d'éléments et d'artifices communs, tentent de définir les territoires respectifs de l'enfant, de l'adolescente et de la femme, d'enregistrer des « devenirs » possibles. S'il fallait y ajouter une filiation plus contemporaine elle pourrait être trouvée quelque part du côté de l'école de Yale : soit une tradition, d'esprit très américaine, initialement fortement marquée par le style documentaire de Walker Evans et qui, avec des photographes tels Phillip Lorca diCorcia (et à un degré encore plus fort Gregory Crewdson) , aurait évolué vers une théâtralité plus prononcée. Les images de cette série se situent quelque part par là, dans une narrativité retenue, où la mise en scène est suggérée et non imposée.

Car cette théâtralité n'a rien d'ostentatoire, rien de pleinement fabriqué. Plusieurs de ces images auraient à cet égard sans doute pu figurer dans La Vie Nouvelle. Et pourtant, le simple choix d'un vêtement autre, extérieur, les conduit imperceptiblement ailleurs, les fait très légèrement se détacher de leur contexte quotidien, comme un subtil déraillement du cours habituel des choses. Aucune volonté d'opposition brutale, ni de dissonances maniéristes entre le vêtement, le modèle et son environnement dans ces images.

Le contraste que l'on peut relever entre la sophistication de certaines tenues et la réalité middle class de la banlieue américaine n'est que fort peu appuyé. Le choix de vêtement y semble toujours fait en accord avec le modèle selon une logique qui reste celle de la vraisemblance : chaque jeune femme choisit son personnage et s'y projette, mais reste pleinement en accord avec le contexte et le décor qui est le sien, comme elle participe pleinement de la mise en scène de l'image finale, selon la maïeutique photographique de Lise Sarfati : cette opération qu' elle-même qualifiait de « rituel chaque fois renouvelé et chaque fois différent » - où la prise de vue est le résultat d'un échange davantage que d'une « domination d'un opérateur sur un sujet ». Le changement induit par le vêtement n'a donc rien d'une métamorphose.

Parfois il est même imperceptible. Dans tous les cas le vêtement ne fait jamais figure d'un déguisement sous lequel le modèle disparaitrait : une paire de chaussures aux talons inhabituellement hauts, un chemisier un peu trop sophistiqué, un imprimé qui détonne légèrement, un maquillage un peu trop prononcé, sont autant de signes furtifs qui agissent, pour qui sait être attentif, comme autant de signaux. Tous ces punctums, pour reprendre la terminologie barthésienne, font légèrement vaciller le réel. Le vêtement n'y est jamais qu'accessoire, de manière littérale et figuré : incident et comme secondaire sur beaucoup d'images il se révèle néanmoins pleinement nécessaire à la cristallisation de la fiction : c'est bien lui qui permet au regarder d'accéder à un récit possible.

Cette tentation de fiction plus affirmée que dans les séries précédentes est pleinement assumée par Lise Sarfati. Lorsque cette dernière évoque les jeunes filles qui y sont présentes, c'est le terme de personnages auquel elle a le plus souvent recours. Pour désigner le travail de la styliste qui l'accompagnait, elle emploie le mot de costumière. Des glissements révélateurs de ce qui est en jeu ici et devient manifeste dans les choix de mise en page effectués lors de la mise en relation des images au sein du magazine. Alors que La Vie nouvelle insistait sur des instants isolés, proposant une vision fragmentaire sur le mode kaléidoscopique, certains modèles revenant plusieurs fois au cours de l'ouvrage, le parti-pris retenu ici est celui de la séquence : soit une série de successions d'images, chacune consacrées à une jeune fille différente dans lesquelles chaque cliché semble devenue photogramme extrait d'un film. L'ouverture au récit s'en trouve confortée, le modèle y affirme page après page son statut de personnage, chaque historiette y succédant à l'autre. Le modèle est d'ailleurs davantage celui du recueil de nouvelles, quelque part du côté du non dit, de la suggestion, de l'anecdote, comme dans un recueil de Raymond Carver. L'ensemble sera entrecoupé d'autres images, qui elles, on le devinera progressivement sont des publicités. Obéissant dans leur parti pris formels aux mêmes règles que les photographies de modèles, elles ne coupent pas le continuum visuel mais agissent néanmoins comme autant de courts répits, des temps morts-des natures mortes- entre deux reprises du récit…

Face à ce travail, il ne parait pas hors de propos d'évoquer d'autres références américaines, plus particulièrement l'eouvre de Cindy Sherman, et ses Films Stills des années soixante-dix. Dans une oeuvre toute entière placée sous le signe du déguisement et de la mise en scène de soi, Cindy Sherman s'est à plusieurs reprises intéressée directement à la mode et à l'esthétique des photos de mode, notamment dans ses séries Fashion (1983-84 et 1993-94) ou Pink Robes (1994) ou, de manière plus commerciale et plus récente pour Balenciaga en 2007. Pourtant davantage qu'à ses travaux c'est aux Film Stils que cette série de Lise Sarfati peut renvoyer. Si les images de cette dernière apparaissent bien comme des « stills », chargés d'un certain poids fictionnel, cette fiction est d'un tout autre genre : moins épique, dénuée des références artistiques et cinématographiques, moins critique et moins référentielle, moins postmoderne en quelque sorte. Là où les pseudo photographies de plateau de Sherman semblent toutes extraites des grands récits du cinéma de l'après-guerre (des héroines du néoréalisme italien à celles des productions hollywoodiennes), les images de Lise Sarfati proposent une fiction modeste et vernaculaire, ancrée dans le quotidien de l'american way of life des classes moyennes aisées. Une ébauche d'un récit, sans baroque ni merveilleux, dont l'article de mode, par la perturbation subtile qu'il introduit par rapport aux séries précédentes, serait le véhicule voire le déclencheur. Comme si, très littéralement et consciemment Lise Sarfati avait pris le parti de rejouer ses clichés précédents : un remake, « en costume » cette fois-ci, de La vie nouvelle en quelque sorte.

Whatever you do, don't say the word “fashion.” But nevertheless, we show up in a car with a stylist and a trunk full of fashion items we'll unpack later, under a blazing sun. We're back in Austin, Texas, known territory. Even if they're not always familiar, the streets, colors and faces produce a certain feeling of déjà vu. Back in Austin, a city with its own distinct rules, rituals and enduring underground teenage culture. We run into girls who've posed for you before. They haven't changed much; they're just slightly older, some of them about to emerge from adolescence, others already women. A few have left - we'll go all the way to California to shoot one of them. Later we'll meet new girls, by chance on the streets and through friends. In turn, they, too, will pose for you. It's just like five years ago, in 2003, only a little different, like a slightly modified replication of what we did then.

So we never talk about fashion. A way of distancing yourself from a world where you don't necessarily feel at home, of not getting the models too psyched up, and, finally and above all, of not too hastily defining a territory with its stereotypes and habits. To give it a name would mean circumscribing a practice in advance - locking in it. That's how it's always been with Lise Sarfati. She seems reluctant to put what she does into words, except in negative terms: this isn't fashion photography, she explains. So what is it? Fulllength portraits? Why not? We shouldn't let the models' lack of expression confuse us. These photos have a highly sociological dimension, and are infused with psychological content. But that term is too aesthetically freighted, too linked to other kinds of art and other, older practices, to be appropriate here. Should we call them “figure studies,” in the sense of the old term for what was once considered a genre in itself? Maybe that would be more accurate. Each of these photos literally records the distance between a body and the space that surrounds it, and in that way, metaphorically (and this time very consciously) constructs a relationship between the model and the world around her. In the choreography of the bodies, these shots of teenagers, whether taken in Moscow, Ikcha, Saint Petersburg, Vilnius, Berkeley, Oakland or Austin, convey a feeling of being out of phase with the world. Obvious or suggested, playful, painful or indifferent, this sense, often bordering on an absence from the world, is what all the models have in common. In this account, adolescence is a constant state of becoming. These teenage girls resist any attempt to pin them down, and pose an awesome challenge to the act of photographically recording them.

All these girls are located simultaneously in the here and now of the picture and an indefinable elsewhere. This fundamental ubiquity is, to my mind, the reason for Sarfati's interest in young models. She likes to cite Gombrowicz and his fondness for the concept of immaturity - a secret revolt, a silent refusal, a game played with life and reality, and especially the idea of a subject both malleable and yet elusive, who always, in the end, slips away. Thus the idea of adolescence as a territory we've all explored but that now remains beyond our reach and comprehension. If all portraiture can be conceived as a confrontation between various selves (the social self, the private self - here we recall Barthes' words, “In front of the camera I am simultaneously who I think I am and who I'd like people to think I am”), with teenage models this confrontation takes on a unique dimension.

This basic dimension, present in her previous series, reappears here as well. This is not work with amateur models done in the name of a search for some truth or other, “real life” contrasted to the supposedly artificial world of fashion. That's already been done a hundred times, sometimes successfully, and there's not much reason to do it again. Of far more interest here is the very close, very powerful internal link between this new set of photos and Sarfati's previous work, particularly the pictures she made in several American cities, including Austin, published in her 2005 book The New Life. Actually, what most attracts our eye and our attention is exactly this proximity, the odd impression that with this Fashion Magazine commission Sarfati consciously went back to the same sites she photographed before, to redo what she did five years ago. Like a throbbing feeling of déjà vu, a stuttering in time, looking at these photos is like the experience of meeting someone you think you know and at the same time feeling confused because the apparently familiar face seems to have slightly changed.

These girls aren't exactly the same. Obviously the fact that an identical repetition is impossible is not the only reason. The models from last time have gotten older and changed; others have replaced them. New settings and interiors have succeeded the old ones. But more, Sarfati's approach itself has also slightly shifted. Adolescence is a period of constant role-playing, of being traversed by multiple, contradictory and fleeting identities assumed one after another depending on the interlocutor, often dramatically contrasting. Teenagers are insincere by definition, and how they dress is a privileged mode of expression of that insincerity. Sarfati knows that and plays with it. Sheathed in new clothes, these models are no longer completely themselves. Now they're acting, undoubtedly a little more today than at other times. They're not just wearing a different pair of shoes, blouse or dress. They've slipped into a different skin - they become someone else. The artist's interest in the figure of the double, manifested by the presence of narcissistic mirror reflections and the motif of sisters, accentuates, in many of these pictures, this impression of a copy or a double.

Despite the geographic and temporal distance that separates Sarfati's work from that of the Victorian photographer Lady Hawarden, when you see the latter's tableaux vivants, with their indeterminate content, made in her London apartment in the 1850s, it's hard not to draw a parallel. Both women use similar elements and artifices in an attempt to define the respective territories of childhood, adolescence and adult womanhood, and to record possible becomings. If we had to add a more contemporary filiation, perhaps we should look to the Yale school, a tradition very much in the American spirit, initially dominated by the documentary style of Walker Evans, that later evolved towards a more pronounced theatricality with photographers like Phillip Lorca diCorcia (and even more with Gregory Crewdson). The images in Sarfati's current series, with their restrained narrative and subtly suggested staging, can be situated somewhere in that neighborhood.

This theatricality is in no way ostentatious or simply fabricated. In that sense, many of these photos could have easily appeared in The New Life. Yet the simple choice of a different, exterior item of clothing imperceptibly shifts them elsewhere, detaches them just slightly from their quotidian context, as if the normal course of events had gone off track just a little. There's no obvious disparity or mannerist dissonance between the clothing, the model and her environment in these photos. The contrast between the sophistication of certain getups and the middle class reality of American suburbia is there, but it's totally unlabored. The clothing always seems to have been chosen to match the model, and the logic is one of verisimilitude - each young woman projects a character she has chosen, but remains completely in harmony with her own natural context and setting. In accord with Sarfati's photographic maieutics, they're all full participants in the final photo's mise en scène, in what the artist calls “a ritual made new and different every time.” The shot is more the result of an exchange than “the domination of a subject by a camera operator.”

Thus the change induced by the apparel has nothing in common with metamorphosis. It is even imperceptible sometimes. In any case, the clothing never seems to be a disguise under which the model disappears. Shoes with exaggeratedly high heels, a slightly too sophisticated blouse, a print that's not quite appropriate, a little too much makeup - all these are furtive signs that serve, for the attentive viewer, as signals, as punctums, to use Barthes' term, that render the real slightly uncertain. Here clothing is never more than an accessory, literally and figuratively. Incidental and in many of these photos secondary, still it turns out to be totally necessary to the crystallization of the fiction, the element that allows the viewer to access a possible narrative.

Sarfati is fully conscious of the fictional pull that is more pronounced in this work then previously. When talking about these girls, she usually refers to them as characters. She calls the stylist who accompanies her a costumer. These slips reveal what's going on here, which becomes obvious in the layout choices when the photos are arranged into magazine spreads. Whereas The New Life emphasized isolated moments, offering a fragmented, kaleidoscopic vision in which certain models reappear several times in the course of the book, here she opts for a more sequential approach, a series of consecutive photos, each of a different girl, in which every shot could be a movie still. This reinforces the openness to narrative. As the pages go by, the models increasingly assume the status of characters and one short story follows another. Further, the format is like that of a collection of short stories, the kind where the important part is what's not said, like in a Raymond Carter book. The ensemble is intercut with other images, which, we realize little by little, are ads. Obeying, in their formal choices, the same rules as photos of fashion models, they don't interrupt the visual continuum but nonetheless act like short intermissions - still photos, still lifes - between two narrative takes.

In considering this ensemble, it seems appropriate to cite other American references, particularly Cindy Sherman's work, such as her 1970s Film Stills. In an oeuvre thoroughly marked by the disguising and staging of the self, Sherman has repeatedly taken an interest in fashion and the aesthetics of fashion photography, notably in the Fashion series (1983-84 and 1993-94), Pink Robes (1994) and her more commercial and recent work for Balenciaga in 2007. But this Sarfati series has more in common with the Stills than Sherman's fashion-oriented production. While the pieces in this ensemble, with their fictional charge, do seem like stills, the fiction here is of an entirely different quality, less epic, stripped of artistic and filmic references, less critical and referential, in a way less postmodern. Whereas Sherman's pseudo set photography evokes post-war classic movies (with leading lady types ranging from Italian neorealism to Hollywood), Sarfati's images offer a more modest and vernacular fiction anchored in the quotidian of the comfortable middle class American way of life. A sort of narrative sketch, neither baroque nor extravagant, in which fashion items, by introducing a subtle perturbation in relation to her previous series, serve as the vehicle or even the detonator. As if, quite literally and consciously, Sarfati had opted to revisit her previous work, a kind of costumed remake of The New Life.

"…Sous une véranda américaine…" Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita.

S'il s'agissait ici seulement des formes, la tâche de les traduire en paroles serait autrement plaisante ; ce serait même un pur plaisir, car il y a ici de la beauté. Ceci dit, ce plaisir, s'il y en avait, serait sans doute tout, sauf pur. La nature d'une séduction sournoise que propagent lentement dans l'espace ces êtres en tout semblables aux corps humains, composés, morphologiquement parlant, des mêmes groupes nominaux, à la syntaxe correcte, est loin d'être « pure ». Et même, quant à la syntaxe, quelques détails clochent constamment. Encore, cette tête avec ce cou et cette nuque (surtout la nuque !), peut-elle aller à la limite avec ces jambes, mais fallait-il absolument - j'entends, de façon définitive - lui joindre, par exemple, ces bras, précisément? C'est la question qui se pose, et même, plus qu'une simple question : c'est le problème - non une impression - qui se pose et qui s'impose d'une façon métaphysique, à la manière de Kubrick, dirait-on. Ensuite, si notre intuition est juste, on pourrait tout de suite, sans employer des tournures rhétoriques inutiles, proposer une « formule de lecture ». Pour aller vite (car c'est ce qu'on veut), on pourrait dire qu' « eux » sont là en train de nous narguer. Même quand ils se livrent à notre regard en toute confiance apparente, en s'abandonnant comme des objets lourds et privés de vie.

Bien sûr, je force le trait en les opposant à nous, en constituant de façon artificielle la catégorie d'« eux ». Je crois, néanmoins, que la démarche est méthodologiquement valable, et même positivement vitale. Je préviens immédiatement que je refuse de me mélanger à eux et de jouer à leurs jeux de séduction lente et sournoise. Je prends le parti de résister. La sensibilité n'a rien à faire dans cette histoire. Alors, qu'on me traite comme on veut, du moins on me doit le respect pour l'effort. D'autant plus que la résistance ne signifie pas la froideur. Tout au contraire, cette résistance est (encore) tout élastique, pénétrable, brûlante presque. La preuve : je parle (encore) de moi, comme si j'avais peur de me lancer dans l'interprétation du sujet et donc en quelque sorte de me mêler, inévitablement, à « eux », de participer à leurs rituels étranges.

Une autre preuve : (comme dirait Lise) je déteste les vieux.

J'ai dit « étranges » pour prêter davantage de clarté à ma résolution : garder le statu quo. Ceci dit, étant donné, à la fois, la science et la tradition littéraire, nous en savons long, notamment, sur la nature de ces rituels que, profitant malicieusement de leur absence « en vrai » (comme dirait Françoise Dolto), « eux » sont (ou plutôt chacun d'« eux » est) en train de mettre en scène.

Première règle du jeu auquel « eux » jouent : ne pas céder à la matière. J'entends, par là, à l'existence matérielle et objective comme preuve de quoi que ce soit. Quitte à tout casser ou à se casser la figure. La métaphysique européenne et le romantisme allemand, s'ils ne les ignoraient pas royalement, leur seraient d'un grand secours. Mais en sens inverse.

À commencer par le corps qui n'est jamais définitivement à « eux », même quand tout y est déjà en place. L'ambition de l'indéfini (comme dirait Gombrowicz) qui naît, au coeur même de la contradiction, du fait d'être, à la fois, pareil aux autres et désespérément unique. Comment se déterminer alors à habiter définitivement ce corps comme seule variante possible, alors que l'espace autour est inépuisablement riche de formes ou de « formules » que l'on peut « essayer » à volonté, comme on essaye des robes ? Je parle des strates culturelles dans lesquelles « eux » sont parachutés comme des extraterrestres - des esprits païens (comme dirait Nabokov, le même qui se demandait pourquoi, finalement, « elles » imitent toujours les putes) - et qui sont faites davantage d'images que de choses matérielles. Alors ils essayent des corps - processus hallucinogène (pour « eux » comme pour nous). Car, en apparaissant, disparaissant et réapparaissant, ils cherchent autant à se perdre, à se tromper, à se faire autres qu'à (se) rappeler leurs propres existences, jamais certaines ni définitives. Expériences qui ne sont que trop ambiguës. Ce qu'ils réussissent, en tout cas, c'est de « nous » mettre mal à l'aise, nous qui sommes capables d'accepter comme un a priori des choses aussi absurdes que les orteils.

À moins d'être des saints. En tout cas, pas de banalité, ni de complaisance… Le gentil couple « Rimbaud - Lolita » que j'ai remarqué hier dans le métro était exactement comme tout le monde et s'ennuyait à mort. Alors que moi, nourrie de Salinger (qu'aujourd'hui je ne pourrais lire autrement qu'en le reliant à l'Adolescent de Dostoïevski) j'ai senti, dans un accès de réelle douleur vasculaire, la honte de l'extrême laideur de l'environnement que nous avons mijoté pour « eux », rien qu'avec nos visages et nos corps. Mais pas non plus de complaisance envers nous-mêmes.

À propos, quant aux visages, « eux » n'en ont pas. Ce ne sont, en effet (je parle de leurs visages) que des lieux communs, mais vertigineux. Car, tout en leur servant d'alibi, ce ne sont, en effet, que des signes d'absence. « Eux » ne sont pas là : il n'y a personne, ni à la maison, ni dans le jardin, ni dans la ville. Il n'y a que le chaos qu'ils ont laissé, en essayant, dans la mesure du possible, d'arranger quelque chose avec les éléments qu'ils ont trouvés en arrivant, quelque chose qui, quoi qu'on fasse, nous ramène au cercueil ou à la décharge.

Privés de visages, ils possèdent ce dont disposent les anges - les cheveux. Remarquons, en passant, que de visage, Béatrice n'en avait pas non plus. Elle avait en revanche un certain mouvement du corps, une inclination (on imagine : un cou, une nuque, des épaules), enveloppée dans un habit rouge qu'elle offrait au regard de Dante entre son apparition à l'âge de neuf ans et sa disparition à l'âge de dix-neuf ans. C'est à cette inclination que Dante reconnut l'ange.

Explicitement, Nabokov cite Dante, mais sur un ton dérisoire. Une autre citation dantesque, plus secrète, est pourtant cachée dans une phrase où Lolita est nommée NOVA. Par ailleurs, de même que Béatrice, Lolita n'a pas de visage. Elle possède, à la place, des épaules couleur de miel, un dos (elle tourne sur ses genoux) et une crinière de cheveux châtain clair. Par ces signes, au moment où elle se fait voir, elle est immédiatement détectée par Humbert dans sa qualité de démon.

Il est temps d'abandonner simulacra nostra, dit l'ange à Dante. Il s'agit des simulacra qui naissent, selon les opticiens médiévaux, entre l'objet matériel et l'oeil. Pourtant on ne doit pas confondre ces présences immatérielles avec des simili , images également, mais disposées sur la sphère et donc pareillement éloignées du centre (je propose de passer vite sur ces endroits que Dante lui-même qualifie d'obscurs). Quant aux simulacra, on dirait qu'il s'agit de la photographie : l'image, au lieu de se produire au fond de la boîte crânienne, se fait entre celui qui regarde et ceux qui sont vus au fond du boîtier. Dante aurait sans doute appelé l'appareil photographique « l'ange de la vue ».

Si Béatrice, sans visage, composée uniquement de mots (et c'est là le secret de la lingua de Dante), fait partie des simili, le mouvement d'inclination qu'elle offre à Dante ou dont elle le prive est, sans doute, celui de la catégorie des simulacra (ici entre en scène Dante photographe). Par ailleurs, de même que Béatrice, Lolita est avant tout une affaire de style. L'impossible exploit (Nabokov le dit en ces termes) serait de définir une fois pour toutes la nature fatale de « leur » charme.

Je propose de reconnaître, dans certaines photographies de Lise, les lunettes noires de Lolita et la robe rouge de Béatrice.

Sans non plus attacher trop d'importance à ce genre de détails.

"... Under an American veranda ..." Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

If it were only a question of forms here, the task of translating them into words would be a particular pleasure; it would even be a pure pleasure, for there is beauty here. That said, this pleasure, if there were any, would undoubtedly be anything but pure. The nature of a sly seduction that slowly propagates in space these beings which are similar in all ways to human bodies, composed, morphologically speaking, of the same nominal groups, with the proper syntax, is far from being "pure." And as for the syntax itself, certain details constantly ring false. This head, with this neck and this nape (above all the nape!), may still possibly go with these legs, but must one absolutely - I mean, in a definitive way - join precisely these arms to it, for example? That is the question that arises, and, even more than a simple question, that is the problem - not an impression - that arises and imposes itself in a metaphysical way, after the manner of Kubrick, one might say.

Then, if our intuition is right, one might immediately suggest a "reading formula," without unnecessary rhetorical turns of phrase. Jumping to conclusions (which is what we want), one might say that "they" are there in the process of taunting us.

Even when they offer themselves to our view in all apparent confidence, yielding themselves up like heavy, lifeless objects.

Of course, I'm forcing things by opposing them to us, by artificially setting up the category of "them." I believe, however, that the approach is methodologically valid, and even positively vital. I immediately make it known that I refuse to get mixed up with them and play their games of slow and sly seduction. I choose to resist. Sensibility has nothing to do with it. So, say what you will about me, at least you owe me respect for the effort. The moreso as resistance does not mean coldness. On the contrary, this resistance is (still) quite flexible, penetrable, almost ardent. The proof is that I am (still) talking about myself, as if I were afraid to launch into the interpretation of the subject and thus in some way inevitably get mixed up with "them," to participate in their strange rituals.

Another proof: (as Lise would say) I hate old people.

I said "strange" in order to lend more clarity to my resolve to maintain the status quo. That said, given both science and literary tradition, we know a great deal, notably, about the nature of these rituals which, profiting maliciously from their "real" absence (as Françoise Dalto would say), "they" are (or, rather, each of "them" is) in the process of staging.

The first rule of the game "they" play is: don't yield to matter. By that I mean to material and objective existence as a proof of anything at all. At the risk of breaking everything or of breaking their own necks. European metaphysics and German romanticism, if they weren't regally unaware of them, would be of great help here.

But in the opposite sense.

To begin from the body which is never definitively "theirs," even when everything is already in place. The ambition of the indefinite (as Gombrowicz would say) which is born, at the very heart of contradiction, of the fact of being at once like others and desperately unique. How, then, resolve to inhabit this body definitively as the one possible variant, while the surrounding space is inexhaustibly rich in forms or "formulas" that one can try on at liberty, the way one tries on dresses? I'm speaking of the cultural strata into which "they" have parachuted like extraterrestrials - pagan spirits (as Nabokov would say, he who asked himself why, in the end, "they" always imitate prostitutes) - and who are made more of images than of material things. So they try on bodies - a hallucinogenic process (for "them" as for us). For, in appearing, disappearing, and reappearing, they seek as much to lose themselves, to deceive themselves, to make themselves other, as to remind (themselves) of their own existence, which is never certain or definitive. Experiments which are all too ambiguous. What they succeed at, in any case, is at making "us" uneasy, we who are capable of accepting a priori something as absurd as toes. Unless we're saints.

In any case, no banality, nor complacency . . . The nice "Rimbaud - Lolita" couple I noticed yesterday in the subway was exactly like everyone else and bored to death. Whereas I, nourished by Salinger (whom I could not read today without linking him to Dostoevsky's Adolescent), felt, in a fit of real vascular pain, the shame of the extreme ugliness of the environment we have concocted for "them," if only with our faces and bodies.

But no complacency towards ourselves either.

By the way, as for faces, "they" don't have any. They are, in fact (I'm speaking of their faces), only commonplaces, but staggering ones. For, while serving them as an alibi, they are in fact only signs of absence.

"They" are not there: there is no one either in the house, or in the garden, or in the town. There is only the chaos they have left behind, while trying, as far as possible, to arrange something out of the elements they found when they came - something which, whatever one does, brings us back to the coffin or the lumber-room.

Deprived of faces, they have what angels have - hair. Let us note, in passing, that Beatrice also had no face. On the other hand, she had a certain movement of the body, an inclination (you imagine a neck, a nape, shoulders), wrapped in a red robe which she offered to Dante's view between her appearance at the age of nine and her disappearance as the age of nineteen. It was by that inclination that Dante recognized the angel.

Nabokov explicitly cites Dante, but in a mocking tone. However, another more secret dantean citation is hidden in a phrase in which Lolita is called NOVA. Besides, like Beatrice, Lolita has no face. Instead, she has shoulders the color of honey, a back (she turns on her knees), and a mane of light chestnut hair. By these signs, the moment she makes herself seen, she is immediately detected by Humbert in her quality as a demon.

It is time to give up simulacra nostra, the angel says to Dante. It is a question of simulacra that are born, according to medieval opticians, between the material object and the eye. However, one must not confuse these immaterial presences with simili, which are images as well, but disposed over the sphere and thus equally distant from the center (I suggest that we pass quickly over these places which Dante himself qualifies as obscure). As for the simulacra, one would think it was a question of photography: the image, instead of being reproduced at the back of the brain box, is made between the one who looks and those who are seen at the back of the box. Dante would undoubtedly have called the camera the "angel of sight."

If Beatrice, without a face, composed uniquely of words (and that is the secret of Dante's lingua), is one of the simili, the movement of inclination which she offers to Dante, or deprives him of, is doubtless that of the category of simulacra (here Dante the photographer comes into the picture). Besides, like Beatrice, Lolita is first of all a matter of style. The impossible exploit (Nabokov puts it in these terms) would be to define once and for all the fatal nature of "their" charm.

I suggest recognizing, in certain of Lise's photographs, the black-rimmed glasses of Lolita and the red dress of Beatrice.

Though without attaching too much importance to such details.

I first became familiar with Lise Sarfati's work through her series of stunning photographs made in Russian cities, including Moscow, Norilsk and Vorkuta, in the 1990s. A fluent Russian speaker, Sarfati focused in this body of work on a kind of brutal “bohemia,” and the intensity of life in the midst of post-Soviet decay. Those images proved her to be a sensitive and imaginative observer-of dread-filled, decaying industrial sites that serve as metaphors for chronic loss and waste, and of physically and socially ostracized young people. She showed us the inmates of an institution for young offenders in Iksha, patiently biding their time and their punishments. She followed the lives of Muscovite transsexuals undergoing gender redefinition. Throughout her work, Sarfati manages to create a loose and layered visualization that allows us, the viewers, to consider the complexities of any place or time, and one that triggers emotions and thoughts that move beyond the ostensible subjects of her photographs.

Sarfati has a capacity for shifting her photographic antennae and adopting multiple understandings of a place and its society. This was proven in her Russian imagery, as it is in her new series made in the United States, which is featured in these pages. Her work plays an important part in today's debates about the uses and visual languages of socially engaged photography, in that Sarfati stubbornly resists “objectifying” the subjects that she is compelled to photograph. Her sense of curiosity is profoundly intuitive, and profoundly human. While we are used to viewing photographs of such subjects-including the legacy of the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, as well as the leitmotif that American youth can offer on the state of U.S. society-Sarfati consciously undermines any desire for or expectation of a single or defining perspective upon complex social ideas. Her photographs are much more concerned with activating within us a connection-via aesthetics and the intensity of her encounters with her subjects-with our world on a much more immediate and less quasi-informational way.

When I met with Sarfati recently, I made the mistake of describing her latest series as a selection of “portraits of American teenagers.” Sarfati called me on this oversimplification, pointing out that I was adopting a contraposition to these subjects. The term teenager, she suggested, is a categorization most often used by adults; and further, she believes that it is a largely market-driven label for a relatively new but powerful consumer group. It is not, at any rate for Sarfati, a term by which young people generally define themselves, nor is this idea what drew her to make this body of work. Sarfati's photographic investigations into the young people that she encountered in shopping malls and streets and homes in the United States are not intended as projections of an adult onto a remembered period of earlier life. There is a strange practicality in Sarfati's choice of subject matter: it is remarkable that this diminutive but very intense Frenchwoman-so out of place in the American cities where she traveled-found connections between her subjects' “out-of-place” feelings and her own. The age range of those Sarfati photographed may be indicative of her recognition of their openness to requests (to them and their parents) to reveal this shared human experience. There's little sense here that this series of images is the result of Sarfati's confidently choreographing these young people into the usual photographic allegories of dislocation or disenfranchisement, regardless of the actual situations or states of minds of these individuals. If anything, I suspect that what she has unlocked are mutual experiences of uncertainty-wrapped up in the mainly nonverbal, notfully- determined or explained way in which she conducts each of her photographic portrayals.

In the realm of contemporary art photography, the depiction of teenagers has lately become a trope of sorts. This is not to suggest that practitioners of great integrity, such as Rineke Dijkstra and Hellen van Meene, haven't contributed bodies of work of subtlety and meaning with their representations of youth. But this choice of subject has become a fairly easy symbol in much contemporary art photography, which perhaps cynically aims to invest itself with these values merely by representing youth as a fragile and fugitive moment in life. Sarfati's subtle visualizations of the passions and frustrations of these young people-all on the cusp of adult responsibility-in Texas, Georgia, North Carolina, Oregon, and California, might be misread as the latest addition to photography's recent near-obsession with this highly photogenic stage of life. Her subject, however, as she herself asserts, is not youth or “teenagerhood” per se, but the possibilities inherent in that period of life, during which emotions are close to the surface, reminding us of the individuality, vulnerability, and also fortitude that we all carry. Sarfati's American series began (typically for her) with intense research and preparation before any pictures were made; she is a prepossessed artist who internally questions and qualifies her reasoning for being drawn to a subject.

She acknowledges her attraction to lives that are being shaped by the paradoxes of where we come from and our aspirations of where we are heading, and she understands that the investigation of such lives is most likely to be possible in sites of massive social shift (such as postindustrial towns in Russia) as well as in the physical manifestations of selfhood that young people consciously project. I imagine that all this allows her to be a relatively anxiety-free maker of photographs, attuned not only to her own motivations but also, in the case of these particular images, to the subtle and unexpected encounters she is liable to have, once she's located the people and places that emit such emotive capacities. It is not entirely surprising that this fluid and substantial body of work was made over the course of only two journeys to America.

It is an example of one of those uncanny experiences for photographers, impossible to fully predict, simulate, or repeat (with any certainty): the photographs, Sarfati says, just “happened.” She did not overtly orchestrate or attempt to define her subjects, but was carried by her own notion that, in the process of creating, she was exploring and understanding them. While her presence inevitably acted upon these young people, she also created the psychological space for them, in turn, to act upon her. This perhaps accounts for Sarfati's success in representing these American youths as-individually and universally-the carriers of states of mind that center on willful self-determination-states of mind that are by no means exclusive to her chosen subjects.

The awakening of adolescence has been a recurring theme that has always fascinated a great many visual artists; conflicts of identity, physical metamorphosis, psychological instability, emerging sexual and emotional sensations within young people are all themes which, in particular, have appeared in photography ever since it was first developed. From Lewis Carrol's “perverse-innocent” girls to Larry Clark's problematic “Kids”, a long and tortuous path has been paved. Alongside these, the latest work of Lise Sarfati could also deservedly be included. A series of fifty images of mostly androgynous-like adolescents, photographed in 2003 during a three-month trip to the United States, taking in cities like Austin (Texas), Asheville (North Carolina), Portland (Oregon), Berkley, San Francisco and Los Angeles (California) and some small towns in Georgia.

It isn't the first time Lise Sarfati has touched on the theme of adolescence; in fact in her earlier book Acta Est (Phaidon Press, 2000) she has already shown, tangentially, some of the most sordid aspects of young people's lives in the former USSR. Paradoxically, although the present photographs have been taken in an environment which is geographically and socio-politically very different, we continue to find some of the more disturbing and unnerving elements that we did in her Russian series. These parallels would seem revolve around the discovery of “strangeness” within everyday spaces and situations, apparently void of any mystery and yet which we observe with a sense of unease and separation, as we would of the unknown.

In each of these portraits, Lise Sarfati “dramatises” the complexity of adolescent identity; within unfamiliar territory - both emotionally and physically - where the simplest of feelings become exalted and everything is lived with an intensity that adults will never again be able to feel. We are talking here of a kind of parallel reality, an interstitial territory which doesn't understand geographical spaces or political systems, which no longer belongs either to a completely real reality or to a consciously conceived fiction, but rather finds itself fed by its own rituals and codes of behaviour, where the dividing line between good and bad, happiness and sadness, innocence and perversity or reality and fantasy is extensively blurred.

This means that these photographs reproduce real characters and situations, but without the slightest intention of being a document. In fact, Lise Sarfati, carefully rations the information that she gives out about each character, forcing us to decide each one's destiny subjectively. Everything oozes verisimilitude but none of these images is a simple reproduction of reality. While far from rigorously following a script, they respond to a degree of planning, and I suspect that the acts and situations in which these adolescents find themselves have been, at most, “suggested” in order to facilitate a more direct transmission of a certain narrative essence. We say this because, although the majority of these photographs are “portraits” in the generic sense, many of them anticipate “stories” which continue outside the limits of the picture, and as such are perceived by the viewer as “pauses in the course of a narrative”. The level of complexity that each photograph seems to have reached with its “models” guarantees the “effect of truth”.

Another common aspect between the photos of American adolescents and the series taken in Russia is their aesthetic clarity of the images, their relationship both from a compositional point of view and their treatment of light and colour, with more or less self-evident references to the history of painting. In short, we have before us a collection of sophisticated images, narcissistic and aesthetically indulgent, “pictures” which are capable of seducing those who look at them, leaving them emotionally defenceless.

Nevertheless, in most cases, beneath the aesthetic beauty of each image, we can detect “anomalies”, and there is not a single attractive element in which an underlying threat is not more or less implied. In fact, one of the things which makes us most uneasy is the fact that - even in the scenes of blatant exhibitionism - most of the characters photographed seem distanced from our view and there seems to be an insuperable separation between their world and our own.

The young people intuitively know that the severe visual intrusion adults have subjected them to is linked to their physical metamorphosis and their sexuality, to that ambiguously emotional territory where they have entered, which adults are unable to access, and which they themselves will have to leave before very long. All this crystallises into an unnerving game between voyeurism and exhibitionism that configures an imaginary space for seeking out the “other”, the “other which we all know can be found within ourselves. It is a search carried out through “signs” that range from clothing to make-up and hairstyle, from the vulnerable show of affection to the brazen, obscene gesture, from the timidly seductive pose to insolent exhibitionism…

Earlier we referred to Larry Clark in order to mark out one of the extremes to which the subject of adolescence has gone to in the field of photography. However, unlike the photographer from Tulsa, whose objective has always been to expose the depressing youth culture of his home town, Lise Sarfati isn't interested in explicitly bringing to light the alienation or tedium of American youth. She isn't moralising nor does she give much space for us to make moral interpretations, and yet her photographs are tremendously perturbing because they transport us to an unknown kingdom - though common to all continents - a territory which exists in the next-door room hardly a centimetre away from the limits of our everyday life and probably also existing within our early memories, or in the fears we feel when we think about what could happen to our own children.