No one is anonymous in a family album: as long as the photo's contemporaries live, they can name who is there, as well as where and when they were photographed; the image severs languages, while the orality of fictions and realities projects its caption onto the image, when that is not already jotted down on its reverse side, an elliptical and fragmentary narrative, a polyphony of voices.
- Anne-Marie Garat, Une passion privée

At first sight, we might see She as a family album whose user manual had been lost, as an album missing the narrator who could supply us with the keys for how to read it and untangle the relationships between faces and bodies. In sum, as a family album that has somehow fallen into anonymity. It is composed of women who seem to evolve in a similar, maybe even a common, environment. We assume the women are related, perhaps even by blood. Determining their exact number requires some caution on our side. How many are they, exactly? Two? Three? Four? Five? Is the blond on this one the brunet on that one? Could they really be the same? Perhaps the brunet someone else? Or she is the blond, only older, later? Their environment, however, has not changed at all. We look more closely at the images, scrutinizing them for recognizable signs other than facial structures. The places? They are only of limited help: like the women who inhabit them, their family resemblances are deceiving - they are sometimes the same, but often slightly different. All that's left, then, are the clothes and tattoos that, in Lise Sarfati's work, distinguish individuals and define their identities better than any other element. It seems, then, that there are four women: Christine, Gina, Sloane, and Sasha. So: a woman (Christine), her two daughters (Sloane and Sasha), and her sister (Sloane). Or: a woman (Gina), her nieces (Sloane and Sasha), and her sister (Christine). Or: two young women (Sloane and Sasha), their mother (Christine), and their aunt (Gina) … It's all a matter of point of view. But the viewer doesn't know or understand much about that at first sight.

A family album preserves only carefully selected photographs. Out of an entire life, it stores only handpicked moments, privileging special occasions, happy ones usually, and consigning the rest to oblivion: happy faces, relaxed moments, places of leisure rather than work. It tends to underline a group's social links and affective relations, to highlight an identity, a communal spirit, a shared life and destiny. The portrait of the couple or group, with all its attendant conventions, is one of its inescapable figures. The family album tries to register the evolution of a particular human community, to write its story and scan the passage of time with each succeeding page. None of this figures in She: instead of a chronology, time is stopped, it appears to stammer and bite its own tail. There is no group photo or desire to stage a collective destiny, but only isolated models and individuals who do not seem to communicate amongst themselves, or only barely; no happy moments or picturesque places, only indifferent moments in ordinary places; no strong gesture, none of the conventional poses, and no complicity with the photographer. The models pose, but reservedly, more often than not without looking into the camera. And even when we do seetheir faces, we don't really seem to see them. They are here, but they are always also there, elsewhere. When we close the book and think a bit about it, we cannot but see She as the anti-family album par excellence.

No actors. (No directing of actors.) No parts. (No learning of parts.) No staging. But the use of working models, taken from life. BEING (models) instead of SEEMING (actors).
- Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematographer

She: the pronoun designates at once the individual and the collective. With exemplary conciseness, Lise Sarfati's title underlines the fact that she has worked essentially with women models since The New Life; nowadays, she says, she finds it easier to project herself “onto them.” Projection does not mean explanation: for much as we may grasp Christine's, Sloane's, Sasha's, and Gina's solitude, we'll never know anything about their dreams. As Lise Sarfati sees it, these four women draw their dramatic value from their status as “characters,” the term she invariably uses to designate her models. We must not understand “character” here in the social sense of the term, as when we say that so and so “is somebody” to indicate that a person plays an important role on the social scene. In that sense of the term, Gina, Sloane, Sasha, and Christine would be better described as anti-characters, not only because of their voluntarily marginal status, but also because of their evident reticence towards that which constructs social character today, namely: the image. They display no narcissism before the camera. Quite the contrary. The four women do not like being photographed, they take no pleasure in it; indeed, they take cover from the camera, which they only rarely look into it. They resist, and this resistance is essential to the photographer.

No, Lise Sarfati's use of the term character draws on its literary and dramatic sense. From her first photo series Acta Est (The Play Is Done), about young adults in the post-Soviet era, Lise Sarfati put her work under the aegis of the theater. Her characters embody strong roles, roles that are always outside the norm: they are free characters “who project themselves into their fates” and manifest an “absolute desire.” However, none of her four characters plays out a dramatic fiction. Here as in The New Life, Lise Sarfati does not give us a narrative thread; instead, she gives us “rather banal things” in the hope that “a complex questioning can be created out of such banalities.” She gives us embryos of fiction that never come to term; suggestions - more than propositions - that seem to develop in-between the images rather than within each image, like the unpredictable weed growing wild from the grooves between cobblestones.

Each image, however, insists on its role as a simulation and its rejection, which becomes increasingly more pronounced in Sarfati's work, of any sort of documentary truth: “I have to create the situation to arrive at something I don't know,” she says. The keyword here is situation. All of the images are situations, not stagings (mises en scène), a term Lise Sarfati rejects. She pits the neutrality of the situation - meaning, simply, the set of circumstances a character finds herself in at a given moment - against the theatricality of the staging. Lise Sarfati does not want her models (Sloane or Sasha, Gina or Christine) to play or replay, she does not want them to seem, but to be. The resistance put up by her models is just as essential there: it seals the link to the Bressonian theory of the model, according to which what is crucial, as Bresson himself puts it, is not what the models show, but “what they hide.”

For Lise Sarfati, this ability to resist and to hide has for a long time been the privilege of the adolescent and young adult. In this respect, the importance she gives to the characters of Christine and Gina, who are older than the models she tends to works with, is something new in her oeuvre. Nevertheless, the running thread that links She to her earlier work is the figure of one of these young adults, her identity still in the process of being built: Sloane, for whom she has a special liking, and who was the protagonist of her previous project, The New Life. In She, the family framework replaces the generational framework of The New Life. By returning to the same model and making her evolve, Lise Sarfati anchors the model even further in the literary tradition in which the same fictional character reappears in different stories.

Sloane herself, however, is a variety of characters already. Like many of Lise Sarfati's women characters, Sloane has a fetish for clothes. Wearing a wig - now a blonde, now a redhead - she eludes the attempts to identify her. With Sloane, as with models of she used in Austin, Texas, the variety in clothing is integral to the play of identities. Sloane's vintage dresses single her out as different, as outside the norm; they accentuate the atemporal character of the images, the recurring sense that there is something out of joint about the quaint clothes and interiors so reminiscent of the architecture of a Victorian America immortalized by Edward Hopper and Walker Evans is out of joint. But, here too, and without any systematicity, many of the images take us back to a decidedly contemporary America. The final impression, then, is of a blur red chronology akin to that of fantastic narratives, in which the same character coexists in different temporal periods.

The sequence would form a continuous narrative, similar to a series of film stills; the series would be the exploitation, the exhaustion, of a single idea, a single object; the suite could be a “divisible” montage of several photographs that relate something other than themselves once they've been hung, like a message or a visual charade.
- Hervé Guibert, “Ghost Image”, 1981.

Which one of these best fits Lise Sarfati's approach in She? It is awkward to settle only for one - a sign of the complexity of the object. Is it the suite? This model, the least constraining of the three, fits the work as a whole quite well. The series? Yes, but then we might be tempted to say that She contains four different but intertwined series. The sequence? This is indeed present - albeit in discreetly, in the details - owing to the way two similar images are immediately put into relationship, as if they had been shot in continuity. The work, consequently, appears to stammer or stutter. Its rhythm seems to slow down, as if it suddenly pausing or lingering over particular moment, at the same time that it seems to speed up, as in those films where the camera suddenly takes off. Let us call it, then, a complex set: a photographic series (conceptual logic) composed of suites at once disjointed and intertwined (individual and spatial logic) and gathered, now here and now there, as if in a sequence (temporal logic).

Evidently, the general movement yielded by the work is not regular. Lise Sarfati is clearly attentive to changing rhythms, to acceleration, deceleration, syncopation, and so forth. If we had to find a compositional model for She, then it seems we would do better to look to music. “A real composition, as if you were making music”: that is the instruction Lise Sarfati - who has in the past forged relationships between image and music - gives to one of the models. Here, though, and to a much greater extent than in the past, the musical paradigm develops out of the very structure of the work. Each of the four figures produces a different melodic line, a different “theme” - which in Greek means that which is “set” or “placed.” Sloane's theme may appear to be the dominant one (she opens and closes the internal unfolding of the images), but that does not keep Christine's, Gina's, and Sasha's themes from being developed, even if it is not as evenly and fully fleshed out as Sloane's. Regardless of the modulations and variations these themes undergo once they are set, they always remain recognizable, though sometimes this demands a bit of effort. If we were to refine this musical model, we would be tempted to see it basically as a contrapuntal format. Far from mingling and mutually reinforcing one another, as in the classic tonal system, each theme preserves its independence by not being completely contaminated by the others. Each one remains a personal, singular - indeed, solitary - destiny, in accordance with each theme's contrapuntal freedom: She, or the attempt at a polyphonic, as opposed to harmonic, construction of feminine identity.

« Dans l'album de famille il n'y a pas d'anonyme : tant que dure le contemporain de sa prise, celui-ci nomme qui est là, où et quand il a été photographié, l'image délie les langues, l'oral des fictions et des réalités y projette sa légende, quand celle-ci n'est pas inscrite à son verso, récit elliptique et fragmentaire, polyphonie des voix ».
Anne-Marie Garat, « Une passion privée », 2008.

De prime abord, on pourrait envisager She comme un album de famille dont on aurait égaré le mode d'emploi. Un album dont le raconteur, censé livrer les clefs de lecture, démêler les liens entre les visages et les corps, se serait absenté. Un album de famille tombé dans l'anonymat en quelque sorte. Soit des femmes, qui semblent évoluer dans un environnement proche voire commun, et que l'on suppose unies par des liens, peut-être de sang. Leur nombre exact demeure toutefois sujet à caution. Combien sont-elles exactement ? Deux, trois, quatre, cinq ? Mais celle-ci, blonde ici, se retrouve brune, là ? Est-ce vraiment la même ? Ne s'agit-il pas d'une autre ? Ou la même plus âgée, plus tard ? Mais l'environnement qui est le leur semble, lui, n'avoir subi aucune modification. On scrute alors plus attentivement les images, à la recherche de signes de reconnaissance, par-delà les traits du visage. Les lieux ? Ceux-ci ne se révèlent que de peu d'utilité : à l'instar des femmes qui les habitent, ils entretiennent des airs de famille trompeurs, parfois les mêmes mais souvent légèrement différents. Restent alors les vêtements et les tatouages qui eux marquent un individu et définissent souvent mieux que tout autre élément, chez Lise Sarfati, les identités. Ces femmes seront donc au nombre de 4 : Christine, Gina, Sloane, Sasha. Soit une femme (Christine), ses deux filles (Sloane et Sasha), et sa soeur (Gina). Soit une femme (Gina), ses nièces (Sloane et Sasha) et sa soeur (Christine). Soit deux jeunes femmes (Sloane et Sasha), leur mère (Christine) et leur tante (Gina)... Tout est question de point de vue. Mais de cela le lecteur ne sait pas grand-chose, ou ne comprend pas grand-chose, de prime abord.

L'album de famille ne conserve que des photographies étroitement sélectionnées : d'une vie il ne retient que des époques choisies, des instants forts, le plus souvent heureux, rejetant dans l'oubli le reste : visages joyeux, moments de loisirs, lieux de détente davantage que de travail. D'un groupe, il tend à souligner les liens sociaux et les relations affectives, à faire ressortir une identité, une communauté d'esprit, de vie et de destin. Le portrait de couple, de groupe, avec les conventions qui l'accompagnent, est une de ses figures imposées. D'une communauté humaine, il vise à enregistrer une évolution, à écrire une histoire, scandant, page après page, le passage du temps. Mais dans She, rien de tout cela : Pas de chronologie mais un temps à l'arrêt, qui semble balbutier ou se mordre la queue. Pas de cliché de groupe, nulle volonté de mettre en scène un destin collectif, mais des modèles isolés, individus qui semblent ne pas communiquer entre eux, ou si peu… Ni instants joyeux ni lieux pittoresque, non, juste des temps faibles et des lieux communs. Pas de geste fort, pas de poses conventionnelles, pas de complicité avec l'opérateur non plus. On pose avec retenue, souvent sans regarder l'objectif. Et même quand on le fixe on ne semble pas vraiment le voir. On est ici et en même temps toujours là-bas, ailleurs. En refermant l'ouvrage, et tout bien réfléchi, on envisagera alors She comme l'anti- album de famille par excellence.

« Pas d'acteurs (pas de directions d'acteur) Pas de rôles (pas d'étude de rôle) Pas de mise en scène Mais l'emploi de modèles pris dans la vie. Etre (modèle) au lieu de paraître (acteur). »
Robert Bresson, Notes sur le cinématographe, 1975

She : le pronom désigne à la fois l'individu et le collectif. De manière lapidaire et exemplaire, le titre souligne, que depuis La Vie Nouvelle, Lise Sarfati travaille essentiellement avec des modèles féminins, dans lesquelles, reconnait-elle, il lui est aujourd'hui plus simple « de se projeter ». Cette projection ne vaut pas explication. Car si l'on peut peut-être juger de la solitude de Christine, Sloane, Sasha et Gina, de leurs rêves on ne saura rien. Aux yeux de Lise Sarfati, ces quatre femmes ont bien pourtant valeur dramatique qui leur confère le statut de « personnage » - le terme que celle-ci emploie invariablement pour désigner ses modèles. Non pas le personnage au sens social du terme, comme lorsque, pour indiquer d'une personne qu'elle joue un rôle important sur l'échiquier social, on dit qu'elle est « quelqu'un ». En ce sens, Gina, Sloane, Sasha et Christine seraient bien plutôt, des anti-personnages : à la fois dans leur statut volontairement marginal, mais également dans leur distance affichée à l'égard de ce qui construit aujourd'hui le personnage social : l'image. Face à l'appareil photographique, nul narcissisme, bien au contraire. Les quatre femmes n'aiment pas être photographié, n'y prennent aucun plaisir, se refusent même souvent à l'objectif qu'elles ne regardent que rarement. Elles résistent et aux yeux de la photographe, cette résistance est essentielle. Non si Lise Sarfati utilise le terme de personnage, c'est bien davantage au sens littéraire et dramatique du terme. Dès son premier ouvrage, Acta Est (la pièce est jouée) sur les jeunes adultes de l'ère post-soviétique, Lise Sarfati avait placé son travail sous le titre du théâtre. Le personnage selon Sarfati incarne un rôle fort, toujours hors norme : un personnage libre, qui « se projette dans sa destinée» et affiche un « désir d'absolu ». Aucun de ces quatre personnages toutefois n'est au service d'une fiction dramatique. Pas plus que dans La Vie Nouvelle Lise Sarfati ne nous propose de fil narratif mais plutôt « des choses très banales » en espérant « qu'à travers ces banalités se crée un questionnement assez complexe ». Juste des embryons de fiction, mais comme mort-nés, des suggestions plus que des propositions et qui semblent se développer entre les images davantage qu'au sein de chaque image, à la manière d'une herbe sauvage et imprévisible, qui pousserait entre les pavés.

Pourtant chaque image recèle sa part de simulation et son refus, de plus en plus marqué avec le temps chez Lise Sarfati, d'une vérité documentaire : « Il faut créer la situation pour arriver à quelque chose que je ne connais pas » dit-elle. Ce dernier terme mérite attention. Toutes ses images ne seraient ainsi que des situations et non des mises en scène - terme que Lise Sarfati réfute : la neutralité de la « situation » donc - soit l'ensemble des circonstances dans lesquelles une personne se trouve simplement à un moment donné - contre la théâtralité de la mise en scène. Il s'agit bien pour Lise Sarfati avec ses modèles, qu'il s'agisse de Sloane et Sasha comme de Gina et de Christine, non pas de re-jouer, non pas de paraître mais « d'être ». En cela la résistance de ses modèles est également essentielle, renvoyant à un modèle bressonnien revendiqué dans lequel, selon les dires du cinéaste, l'important n'est pas ce que montrent ses modèles « mais ce qu'ils cachent ». Cette faculté de résister et de se dérober, a longtemps été, pour Lise Sarfati, l'apanage de l'adolescent et du jeune adulte. A cet égard, l'importance accordée aux personnages de Christine et Gina, plus âgées que ses modèles habituels, est tout à fait nouvelle dans son travail. Le fil conducteur qui relie She à ses travaux antérieurs demeure toutefois bien une figure de ces jeunes adultes, à l'identité en construction, qu'elle affectionne : Sloane, une des principales protagonistes de son ouvrage précédent, La Vie Nouvelle. Au cadre générationnel de la Vie Nouvelle succède ici le cadre familial. En reprenant un modèle pour le faire évoluer, Lise Sarfati l'ancre encore un peu plus dans une tradition littéraire, à la manière de ces personnages de fiction que l'on retrouve d'un récit à l'autre.

Mais Sloane est elle-même déjà plusieurs personnages. Il y a chez elle, à l'instar de beaucoup des personnages féminins de Lise Sarfati, un fétichisme du vêtement. Affublée de perruque, tantôt blonde tantôt rousse, elle se dérobe aux tentatives d'identification. Chez elle, comme chez les modèles d'Austin/Texas, autre ouvrage de Lise Sarfati, la diversité des tenues vestimentaires est au service d'un jeu identitaire. Les Robes vintage de Sloane la désigne comme différente, hors norme contribuant à accentuer le caractère intemporel des images : ce sentiment de décalage que l'on perçoit face au caractère parfois vieillot des tenues comme des intérieurs - ceux de l'architecture d'une certaine Amérique victorienne immortalisée tant par Edward Hopper que par Walker Evans. Mais là encore sans systématisme aucun, nombre d'images nous renvoyant bien à une Amérique résolument contemporaine : plutôt alors l'impression d'une chronologie brouillée, à la manière de ces récits fantastiques dans lesquels le même personnage coexiste dans diverses périodes temporelles.

« La séquence serait une continuité narrative et pourrait se référer à un découpage cinématographique ; la série serait l'exploitation, l'épuisement d'une seule idée, d'un seul objet ; la suite pourrait être un montage « divisible » de plusieurs photos qui disent, une fois accolées, autre chose qu'elles-mêmes, comme un message ou une charade visuelle ».
Hervé Guibert, « L'image fantôme », 1981.

De quoi dès lors se rapprocherait le déroulé de She ? Il est malaisé d'apporter une seule réponse, signe de l'identité complexe de l'objet. Une suite ? A ce modèle, le moins contraignant des quatre, l'ensemble de l'ouvrage semble bien évidemment pouvoir se rapporter. Une série ? Ou mais alors peut-être serait-on tenté de dire quatre séries différentes, qui s'entrecroisent ? Une séquence ? Celle-ci est bien présente, de manière ponctuelle, dans le détail, par la mise en relation immédiate de deux images très proches, comme prises dans la continuité. L'ouvrage semble alors comme balbutier ou bégayer. Son rythme parait alors tout à la fois ralentir comme s'il se posait s'arrêtait soudain sur un moment particulier et en même temps devenir plus saccadé, comme dans ces films où soudain le projecteur s'emballe. Alors disons un ensemble complexe, une série photographique (logique conceptuelle), composée de quatre suites disjointes et entrelacées (logique individuelle et spatiale), assemblées parfois ici et là sous le mode de la séquence (logique temporelle).

De toute évidence, le mouvement général qui s'en dégage n'est pas régulier. Lise Sarfati s'est montrée attentive à la modification des rythmes, entre ralentissements, accélérations, syncopes… S'il fallait trouver un modèle de composition à She, il semble alors qu'il faille bien plutôt recourir à l'exemple musical. « Une vraie composition, comme si tu faisais de la musique » : le modèle est explicitement convoqué par Lise Sarfati qui a parfois dans ses travaux précédents mis en relation musique et images. Mais ici et sans doute davantage que par le passé, c'est au sein même de la structure de l'ouvrage que se développe le paradigme musical. Chacune des quatre figures y assure une ligne mélodique différente : un « thème » - soit, en grec, « ce qui est posé ». Si le thème de Sloane (qui ouvre et clôt le déroulé interne des images) apparaît dominant, s'y développent néanmoins, de manière inégale et moins étoffée, ceux de Christine, Gina et Sasha. Chacun d'entre eux, une fois posé, subit modulations et variations tout en demeurant toujours reconnaissable, même si c'est parfois au prix de quelque effort. Si l'on devait affiner ce modèle musical, on serait tenté d'y voir une forme de contrepoint. Loin de se croiser et de se renforcer à la manière du système mélodique tonal classique, chacun des thèmes conserve son indépendance sans se contaminer pleinement. Chacune reste bel et bien un destin personnel, singulier voire solitaire, selon la liberté contrapunctique de chacun des thèmes : She ou la tentative de construction polyphonique - et non harmonique - d'une identité féminine.

Documentary photography, or the new document, is that which not only lays bare the record of the real world, but also creates a unique photographic narrative where photography, is theme and the viewer all coexist.

My work touches on reality but a human reality. I often find myself in a banal situation, but my aim is to surpass it, to transcend it, in order to discover the core of an existence that can be explained by the solitude of the character in her domestic intimacy, even in the hermetic space of a street or any other desert : the woman is ever alone in a crowd.

She consists of moments of a brilliant history where the combined fragments ultimately form no more than a rather homogenous tale. It is a matter of compositional logic and also a wild ballad in the life of these four women.

My interest in working on this theme arises from the fact that I come from a family of four sisters, and mainly to the constant bitterness caused by the dissolution of family ties between mother, sister, and aunt. I have wanted to explore the feelings of melancholy transmitted from the mother and the aunt to Christine’s two daughters : Sloane and Sasha. The latter systematically refuses to be photographed since the idea of reuniting her mother, aunt and sister in the same series seems to her absurd. There is also the play of identities between two generations that is preserved as an animal instinct.

A series of photographs made over an extended time-period in California, Oakland, berkeley, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Phoenix, Arizona, between 2005 and 2009.
Moments borrowed from four women : Christine, the mother ; her sister Gina ; Sloane, Christine’s daughter, and Sasha, Soane’s sister.
Chritine’s intability, Sasha’s melancholy, Sloane’s repeated transformations, Gina’s feminine-masculine ambiguity…
She describes a complex aesthetic experience fraught with history, feelings, and ghosts.

The direction of the project, framed in a extended time-period, allows following its erratic development. It leaves lots of room for the autonomous construction of narrative fictions for the viewer, scenarios that are merely suggested by the images : a play of identities between Sloane and her mother - and vice versa – between gina and her sister – or conversely – between Sasha and her mother… women who share a singular intimacy before the imminence of disaster, the discovery or premonition of it. Compressing time and mixing years, these images chosen in isolation of these four women comprise a single story.

These women had no need to be photographed and it is their refusal, their resistance, which attracts us to them. Because of She, I’ve discovered the interior of a Victorian home in the Oakland ghetto, but also the urban environment of small Californian cities.

Rosegallery, Los Angeles présente l'une après l'autre deux expositions On Hollywood puis She et confirme le talent de Lise Sarfati qui rejoint le cercle fermé d'artistes français qui s'exportent avec succès.

Lise Sarfati arrive à New York en 2003. Elle part à New Orleans pour commencer sa série The New Life (Twin Palms, Publisher 2005). Puis elle traverse de nombreuses petites villes au Texas, en Arizona, en Californie et en Oregon. Elle revient à Los Angeles en 2009 et 2010 pour photographier les femmes qu'elle a croisées sur les boulevards du quartier d'Hollywood.

Alors que She est un jeu de miroir intime et complexe entre quatre femmes, deux fois deux soeurs, On Hollywood est axé sur le paysage. Les deux séries se suivent mais ne se ressemblent pas. Elles font partie d'un puzzle que Lise Sarfati construit patiemment, inlassablement. Les personnages féminins ont des points communs : elles sont fragiles et fortes à la fois, elles sont décalées, elles se projettent dans une réalité dont elles seules semblent détenir la clef. Pour On Hollywood les rencontres sont le fruit d'une démarche précise. Les femmes de cette série sont vulnérables mais ce sont des femmes qui se battent pour leur survie : des danseuses, des junkies, des actrices en mal de rôle, des provinciales. Sarfati a choisi ces filles pour leur personnalité, leur aura, leur vie décalée. "Elles sont réelles et c'est leur charge émotionnelle qui m'a attirée vers elles." On a l'impression que ces femmes traversent la vie comme des fantômes. Il n'y a jamais de regard direct. "C'est le viewer qui est le seul à regarder et à promener son regard sur la surface de l'image. Ce qui donne à l'image sa propre autonomie. Les filles sont aussi importantes que le paysage." Elle choisit les lieux sans caméra, avec son regard, en revenant de nombreuses fois au même endroit car elle s'y sent bien.

La simplicité du boulevard l'étonne.

Pour cette série, Lise Sarfati utilise une pellicule Kodachrome 64, celle des films hollywoodiens des années 1940. Ce sera l'ultime série de photos réalisé avec ce film, dont la production a été interrompue en juin 2009. Le dernier développement des pellicules s'est fait en décembre 2010.

Cette série renvoie au cinéma de David Lynch ou Wim Wenders aussi bien qu'aux photographies de William Eggleston (pour la couleur) ou Harry Callahan (en particulier sa série de portraits volés appelée : Women Lost in Thought). Mais chez Lise Sarfati ces influences sont parfaitement assimilées. Elle aboutit à une signature visuelle forte, moderne et identifiable, liée à un sentiment d'intériorité. Et, grâce à la beauté et la justesse de ses œuvres, on la suit volontiers.

En France, la BNF prépare une rétrospective de ses œuvres pour 2014. Un livre sur la série She est prévu au printemps-été 2012 (TwinPalmsPublisher).

Since 2003, Lise Sarfati has been traveling across the United States, particularly on the west coast, photographing adolescents and women against the vernacular of the American landscape. The exhibitions On Hollywood and She, opening Feb. 25 and March 31, respectively, at Rose Gallery in Los Angeles, juxtapose subjects against an allegorical landscape that shifts between the real and the fictional. On Hollywood focuses on Los Angeles, while She explores Oakland, but both touch on the notion of fluidity within feminine identity. “I wanted to represent a woman who is both vulnerable and strong, oscillating between promise and despair,” Sarfarti said of her inspirations. “I wanted to give these women a voice, or rather, an image.”

Created from 2009 to 2010, On Hollywood features young women against the backdrop of Hollywood—a fabled place that during its golden era represented the hopes and dreams of aspiring stars. The girls are often pictured in classic Hollywood spaces, dressed casually, but they appear as if caught in an off moment. Sarfati is very precise about who she photographs. The girls juggle multiple jobs—most are dancers. “They are always in motion, and have a particularly difficult life where dependencies on men and drugs merge,” Sarfati says. “[They are] women at the mercy of a strange fate.” The landscape of Hollywood is barren. The women appear lost, unaware of the viewer’s gaze and immersed in their own illusions of the Hollywood myth.

Sarfarti’s earlier series, She, created between 2005 and 2009, is an exploration of two sets of sisters: Christine and Gina, as well as Christine’s daughters, Sasha and Sloane. The series documents their relationships during a period of transition. At the time, Sasha and Sloane had moved from the conservatism of their grandparents’ home to an alternative lifestyle in their mother’s Oakland loft. In an period of re-invention and under the careful gaze of Sarfati’s lens, the girls try to find their identities—Sloane often changes her appearance and seems to enjoy being photographed whereas Sasha, when pictured, is pensive and almost melancholic. “The sisters are isolated, they are alone,” Sarfati says, “It’s the fusion of these four solitudes that creates the series and the story.”

The two older sisters, Christine and Gina, are also also searching. “The mother, Christine, as she appears in my photographs, is threatening, terrifying, but also mysterious and fascinating. She is no longer protective. She is strong. She is independent,” Sarfati says. The older pair of sisters change their hair styles and jobs. Christine is pictured gazing absently in a wedding dress—all four women are constantly in flux. “The women in She reflect one another until you can no longer tell them apart. The only gaze possible is the gaze of the images between themselves,” Sarfati said. “I don’t particularly like mises en scènes. I prefer the search for truth.”

Parisian-born Lise Sarfati has shown internationally and her predominantly female subjects are utterly uneventful and hugely momentous at once.

ROSEGALLERY will show back to back venues, first opening Feb. 25th with works from Sarfati's series On Hollywood, followed in March by the stunning photos from She.

Sarfati has made images of empty rooms, taken from the level of bed-height, where blankets, pillows, bed stands, knick-knacks, the chosen stuff of life none arranged speak multitudes.

That same uncanny, oblique entry point that ends somehow in riveting vision characterizes her images of women. On Hollywood features, predictably, views of the broken in and around Hollywood. Swollen, used up, tired in a way someone that age ought not be, Malaika looks beyond us, a bagged booze bottle in an arm that melds with the smudge of night neon.

Yes, it has been done and done again by everyone from Robert Frank to Philip-Lorca diCorcia. And to some extent this is another iteration of that puffy eyed, densely made up, hung over, hooking and preening, acquiring and being acquired broken dream world of the bleached blond and dominatrix come west to seek the promise land.

But the difference here is that these starkly colored, crystalline clear images are so flat footedly compelling in that Eggleston kind of matter of fact way that any existing, stored narrative we might want to plug in, conjure up, or default to simply fails us in the face of the person that confronts the camera.

There are photographers Graciela Iturbide who beautifully disappear from the image so deep is their empathic connection with their subjects. Sarfati's particular gift part sixth sense, part serious study of the cinematic vision of Vertov or Pasolini is precisely the opposite.

There is a way in which her subjects never lose sight of themselves being watched, never can and may not want to shake loose their position existential, social, photographic as objects. Sarfati's women acknowledge, even seem in some way defiant conspirators in our relentless scopophilic use of them.

The result is that Dana standing before a broken down theater, tattooed, in grotesquely high heels entices us to look (and we do!), lives for and through our inability to resist taking her in visually, yet is somehow deeply sullied by the exchange. As a subtle study of the complexities of female identity (and the negotiations of intimacy and self in general), this work is quite profound; as photography these images are just plain aesthetically gorgeous. Once again, ROSEGALLERY brings us some of the finest international photography around.

What is a photographic series?
It is a set of photographs which are linked to each other and which create a whole. Something which shuts us in and in which we cannot find the exit. It is also a way of thinking. A form.

Is On Hollywood a series?
On Hollywood is a series. But each photograph can be looked at individually. It is a series because the images interrelate and reinforce the photographic form. When did you start this series?
I started it in 2009 and finished it in 2010.

The colors and texture of your photographs have a particular quality. What film did you use?
I worked with Kodachrome 64 transparency film. The rolls were sent to Kansas in the only laboratory which still developed this film. I never saw the results immediately. I realized that this element of not seeing, not knowing, was a determining factor. This situation : where I had to wait and did not know brought me back to the mystery I felt when I discovered photography at the age of 13. A revelation, but after the fact. This Kodachrome film stock is also the one used in Hollywood movies of the 1940s. I wanted to complete the loop and end the story of Kodachrome film on Hollywood. I used this outmoded film stock in the context of Hollywood, which is at the peak of technological advancement and colossal production costs.
I was not part of a huge Hollywood production but on a boulevard where I photographed real women (without paying them, this I insist on in my work) who are considered outsiders.
Their weaknesses became their strength, raising them to the rank of anti-heroes. It is true that film, photography and video have surpassed painting and sculpture and that it may seem odd to return to Kodachrome slides when analog film, photography and video have been overtaken by the digital format. But it is precisely this paradox which interested me.
One often wrongfully compares photographs to paintings. This is nonsense. The image does not refer to painting but to something alive through which passes silence...

Finally, why not a movie?
Because of the silence and stillness, because of the power of the fixed image and its circulation as an object.

On Hollywood is the boulevard but it is also movies?
Everything transits through the image. We are shaped by the image. We need to try and have a critical gaze on the image.
My series On Hollywood shows women who really live in Los Angeles. They probably came to project themselves in the Hollywood landscape and to take advantage of the possibilities of success in this landscape. But everyone knows this story. It is a current affair.
Hollywood interested me more for the concept of landscape as fantasy. These women smoked in general. They are mostly dancers or actresses waiting for a part.

Why smoking?
Because smoking in the United States of America and in California is a revolutionary act. To show that one does not care, that one does what one pleases despite obvious health risks, is already an act of protest.
What seems strange is that these women need to be outdoors to smoke whereas smoking, for me, was always something that took place during a romantic or friendly encounter, or we simply smoked as teenagers, sitting around a table talking.
To have to be outside, on the boulevard, in the forgotten landscape of Hollywood to smoke seemed astonishing.
Everyone was behind the wheel of their car. These women did not have enough money to buy a car. I met Adjibike at midnight. I was photographing another woman in a parking lot. She came by in a pair of shorts. She was muscular and walked fast. She handed me her card in a decisive way, as if it was something obvious... She also wanted to become an image...
Hollywood actresses from the 40s and 50s are always smoking in the movies.

Who are these women?
These are women who work in Hollywood: saleswomen, dancers, strippers, junkies, fetishists, unknown actresses, out-of-towners, lost... Women at the end of their rope.
Many identify themselves with actresses or famous people. In fact I understood that they identified themselves with images. Malaïka was similar to Marilyn Monroe even if she did not say it. She was always expecting us to make the connection though. She had many of Marilyn's attitudes: her giddiness, mood swings which would go from very sad to artificial joy... Elizabeth wore a tattoo with the date of Queen Elizabeth's death. Her face, her makeup, the thinness of her eyebrows and her pale skin were reminiscent of the Queen mother and the imagery linked to her representation...

How would you define the Hollywood landscape?
The Hollywood landscape is elastic. Timeless. The 1930s, the 1950s, the 1970s. A series of locations without end, all real, accumulated next to each other. Or images of locations which stream by you on the boulevards.
I was always told that Hollywood was dirty and full of junkies. Maybe this was behind the scenes: a masked landscape where thousands of women with eye-opening stories were hiding.


How was the idea for the series conceived?
In 2003, when I travelled across the United States to create The New Life, I decided to return to Los Angeles to photograph the women I passed by on the boulevard. It was unconscious, just a desire.
But the idea took several years to grow and take on a precise form. Although they were photographed in the Hollywood landscape, I wanted the series to give the impression that these women felt at home there, like they were in their bedrooms, lost in thought.

How did this idea evolve and how did you materialize it?
When I spent a year in Aix en Provence, in the southeast of France, I was part of a group of situationists which was very theoretical. The concept of psycho-geographical wandering, created by Guy Debord, was our main activity. Guy Debord defines psycho-geography as the study of the precise effects of geographical surroundings on the emotional behavior of individuals. And wandering is a technique to experience brief sojourns in a variety of atmospheres.
In Los Angeles I wandered through Hollywood. I stayed several months. I did not wander like a director of photography or an artist seeking new locations. I just tried to find places where I felt good physically, places which affected my emotional behavior. These places were street corners, bits of sidewalk and small spaces... I returned ten, twenty, fifty times to the same place.

I stayed for a long time on the corner where we see Elizabeth near a shop where they sell grass and near a tobacco shop. All of a sudden, Elizabeth, whom I did not know, arrived. I asked her if I could photograph her. She told me she would be back. I saw her get into the back seat of a car. Two men were in the front, one of them at the wheel. The car disappeared.

I figured she took off with some dealers. She returned and I photographed her. She seemed quite scared. She was thin. She wore a pendant with a small butterfly. She had braces on her teeth that fascinated me because of her age... I took my photograph quickly. I had the feeling she was going to fall over she looked so fragile... Then she said she had to leave, I asked if we could see each other again, she said : "Yes." We made an appointment on Hollywood Boulevard and she finally never showed up.

Did you encounter any difficulties?
Creating a series is always like standing in front of a chain of mountains of difficulties and overcoming them...

The uniqueness of your work is based on the gaze. It reminds me of Roland Barthes who said : « The gaze, if it insists (if it lasts, if it traverses, with the photograph, Time) the gaze is always potentially crazy : it is at once the effect of truth and the effect of madness. »
Truth and madness. Subjectivity. No, I think I first start with a subjective mental image and I try to make it cross through reality, I project it on the outside world. I expect from the viewer, that they will project their subjectivity into the image as well. Also, I hate explaining my work. It is made to be looked at.

Your rhythm could be defined as an oscillation between the character and the landscape but we never really know which one you choose...
Yes, I try to vacillate from one to the other... It is a construction which resembles me. It is also an idea or a way of life.

Qu’est-ce qu’une série photographique ?
C’est une suite de photographies qui s’enchaînent l’une avec l’autre et qui forment un tout. Quelque chose qui nous enferme et dont on n’arrive pas à trouver la sortie. Mais c’est aussi une manière de penser. Une forme.

Est-ce qu’On Hollywood est une série ?
On Hollywood est une série. Mais chaque photographie peut aussi être regardée individuellement. C’est une série car les images se répondent les unes aux autres et renforcent la forme photographique.

Quand as-tu commencé cette série ?
Je l’ai commencé en 2009, puis je l’ai finie en 2010.

Les couleurs et la texture de tes photographies ont une qualité très particulière, quel film utilises-tu ?
J’ai travaillé en diapositive Kodachrome 64. Ces films étaient envoyés au Kansas dans le seul laboratoire qui développait ce film. Je ne voyais jamais le résultat. Je me suis aperçue que cet élément de ne pas voir, de ne pas savoir, était déterminant. Cette situation d'attente et d'inconnu me ramenait au mystère que j’ai connu en découvrant la photographie à l’âge de 13 ans. Une révélation, mais après coup.
Ce film Kodachrome est aussi celui des films hollywoodiens des années 40. Je voulais fermer la boucle et en finir avec l’histoire du film Kodachrome sur Hollywood.
J’ai utilisé des films désuets pour notre époque dans le contexte d’Hollywood qui est au sommet des procédés techniques et des budgets colossaux. Je n’étais pas dans une grande production hollywoodienne mais sur un boulevard où je photographiais sans les payer — je tiens à cet aspect du travail — des filles réelles qui sont considérées comme décalées.
Leur faiblesse devenait une force et les hissait au rang d’anti-héroïnes.
C’est vrai que le film, la photographie, la vidéo ont dépassé la peinture et la sculpture et qu’il peut paraître un peu bizarre de revenir à la diapositive Kodachrome quand le film argentique lui-même, la photographie et la vidéo analogiques sont dépassés par le numérique. Mais c’est ce paradoxe qui m’a intéressé.
On compare souvent à tort la photographie à la peinture et au tableau. Or cela n’a rien à voir. L’image ne renvoie pas au tableau mais à quelque chose de vivant traversé par le silence…

Finalement pourquoi pas un film ?
A cause du silence et de l’immobilité. Aussi pour l’image fixe. Son pouvoir. Sa circulation en tant qu’objet.

On Hollywood c’est le boulevard mais c’est aussi le cinéma ?
Tout passe par l’image. Nous sommes formés par l’image. Nous devons essayer d’avoir un regard critique sur l’image.
Ma série On Hollywood montre des filles qui vivent réellement à Los Angeles. Elles sont sûrement venues pour se projeter dans le paysage d’Hollywood et pour profiter des possibilités de se réaliser dans ce paysage. Mais cette histoire tout le monde la connaît. C’est de l’actualité.
Hollywood m’intéressait plus pour son concept de paysage fantasmé. Ces filles fument en général. Elles sont en majorité danseuses ou actrices en attente de rôles.

Pourquoi fumer ?
Parce que fumer aux Etats-Unis et en Californie, c’est un acte révolutionnaire.
Afficher qu’on s’en fout et qu’on fait vraiment ce qu’on aime au détriment de sa santé, c’est déjà être contestataire.
Ce qui me paraît étrange, c’est que les filles doivent être dehors pour fumer, alors que fumer pour moi a toujours été quelque chose qui accompagnait une rencontre soit amoureuse soit amicale ou simplement nous fumions dans mon adolescence autour d’une table pour discuter.
Le fait de devoir être dehors sur le boulevard dans le paysage oublié d’Hollywood pour fumer ou même marcher m’a paru étonnant. Tout le monde circulait au volant de sa voiture : les filles n’ont pas les moyens de se payer une voiture. J’ai rencontré Adjibike à minuit. Je photographiais une autre fille sur un parking lot, elle est passée en short, elle était musclée et marchait vite. Elle m’a tendue sa carte d’un air décidé comme si c’était quelque chose d’évident… Elle voulait devenir une image elle aussi…
Je me suis aussi rappelé que les actrices d’Hollywood des années 40 ou 50 fument toujours dans les films.

Qui sont ces filles ?
Ce sont des filles qui travaillent à Hollywood, vendeuses, danseuses, des strip-teaseuse, des droguées, des fétiches, des actrices sans gloire, des provinciales, des paumées… Des filles à bout de souffle.
Beaucoup s’identifient à des actrices ou à des personnages connus. En fait, j’ai compris qu’elles s’identifiaient à des images. Malaïka était proche de Marilyn Monroe même si elle ne le revendiquait pas mais attendait inlassablement qu’on lui fasse la remarque. Elle avait aussi beaucoup de comportements de Marilyn, un côté évaporé, un changement d’humeur qui passait du très triste au faussement joyeux… Elizabeth portait un tatouage de la date de la mort de la Reine Elizabeth et son visage, son maquillage et la finesse de ses sourcils, la blancheur de sa peau rappelait la Reine mère et toute l’iconographie liée à sa représentation…

Comment tu définirais le paysage d’Hollywood ?
Le paysage d’Hollywood est élastique. Timeless. Années 30. Années 50. Années 70. Un potentiel de décor sans fin, réels, qui seraient accumulées les uns à côté des autres. Ou alors des images de décors qui défilent tout au long des boulevards.
On m’a souvent dit qu’Hollywood était sale et qu’Hollywood était plein de drogués. C’est peut-être l’envers du décor, c’est le paysage masqué où se cachent des milliers de filles avec des histoires hallucinantes.

Comment a pris naissance l’idée de la série ?
En 2003 lorsque j’ai traversé les Etats-Unis pour réaliser The New Life, j’ai décidé de revenir à Los Angeles pour photographier des filles que je croisais sur le boulevard. C’était inconscient, juste une envie.
Mais l’idée a mis plusieurs années à germer pour prendre une forme précise : je voulais que la série donne la sensation que les filles, bien qu’elles soient photographiées dans le paysage d’Hollywood, dégagent une sensation d’être chez elles comme dans leur chambre à coucher, perdues dans leurs pensées.

Comment a évolué cette idée et comment tu l’as réalisé ?
Lorsque j’ai passé un an à Aix en Provence, dans le sud-est de la France, je faisais partie d’un groupe situationniste qui était très théorique. Les déambulations psycho-géographiques, concept créé par Guy Debord étaient notre activité principale. Guy Debord définissait la psychogéographie comme l’étude des effets précis du milieu géographique agissant directement sur le comportement affectif des individus. Et la dérive comme la technique de passage hâtif à travers des ambiances variées.

A Los Angeles, j’ai dérivé dans Hollywood, j’y suis restée plusieurs mois. Je ne me suis pas promenée comme un opérateur photographe ou même une artiste en mal de décor. J’ai essayé de repérer les endroits où je me sentais bien physiquement, qui opéraient sur mon comportement des effets affectifs. Ces endroits étaient des coins de rues, des morceaux de trottoirs et des petits coins… Je suis retournée des dizaines, des vingtaines et des cinquantaines de fois au même endroit.

Je suis restée longtemps dans ce corner où on voit Elizabeth près d’un magasin où on vend de l’herbe et près d’un tabac. Tout d’un coup, Elizabeth que je ne connaissais pas est arrivée. Je lui ai demandé si je pouvais la photographier. Elle m’a dit qu’elle allait revenir. Je l’ai vu monter dans une voiture à l’arrière. A l’avant, il y avait deux hommes. L’un d’entre eux conduisait, la voiture a disparu.

J’ai senti qu’elle était partie avec des dealers. Peut-être était-ce une projection, peut-être je fantasmais mais je ne pensais pas qu’elle reviendrait. C’est pour cela que j’ai décidé sans espoir de l’attendre. Elle est revenue, je l’ai photographié. Elle avait assez peur, elle était maigre. Elle portait un pendentif avec un petit papillon. Elle portait un appareil dentaire ce qui m’a fascinée vu son âge… J’ai fait très vite ma photographie. J’avais l’impression qu’elle allait tomber tellement elle était fragile… Puis elle a dit qu’elle devait partir, je lui ai demandé si on pouvait se revoir, elle a dit oui. Nous avons pris rendez-vous sur Hollywood Boulevard et finalement elle n’est jamais revenue…

As-tu rencontré des difficultés ?
Faire une série, c’est toujours se trouver devant une chaîne de montagnes de difficultés et les vaincre…

La particularité de ton travail est basé sur le regard. Cela me fait penser à Roland Barthes qui dit : « Or le regard, s’il insiste (à plus forte raison s’il dure, traverse, avec la photographie, le Temps) le regard est toujours virtuellement fou : il est à la fois effet de vérité et effet de folie. »
Vérité et folie. Subjectivité. Non en fait je crois que je pars d’une image mentale subjective et j’essaie de la faire traverser le réel, de la projeter sur le monde extérieur. J’attends du viewer qu’il projette sa subjectivité dans l’image aussi je n’aime pas du tout expliquer mon travail. Il est fait pour être donné à regarder.

Ton rythme pourrait se définir comme un oscillation entre le personnage et le paysage mais on ne sait jamais très bien ce que tu choisis…
Oui, j’essaie de vaciller de l’un à l’autre… C’est une construction qui me ressemble. C’est aussi une idée ou une manière de vivre.

Tish Wrigley is a London based writer, and regular contributor to AnOthermag.com.

"Under the clarity of Sarfati’s lens, with its Eggleston-style lines and compositions, the outward personas of these slim, attractive women starts to unravel, and a discomfiting darkness emerges"

Who? Photographer Lise Sarfati is an eclectic and unusual amalgamation of cultures and influences. Born in France, and starting her photographic career aged just 13, she followed the completion of her Russian Masters degree at the Sorbonne with a decade in the Soviet Union, before moving to California in 2003. She now splits her time between Paris and the United States, with much of her work being inspired by the people and culture of her adopted nation, particularly focused on life in small-town America, where she can create relationships with her subjects, gain their trust and create a true portrait of their lives. Her latest exhibition, She, is currently at the Brancolini Grimaldi gallery in London.

What? In She, Sarfati revisits two sisters, Sloane and Sasha, who had been the subject of an earlier series, along with their mother Christine and her sister Gina. She focuses on the minutiae of their daily existence, capturing them slumped on the sofa in their living rooms, emerging out of the front door, waiting at pedestrian crossings and shopping in local stores. Yet while these activities shown are normal, banal even, the pictures themselves are riven with a sense of melancholy, of near-madness, of tragedies hinted at yet untold. Under the clarity of Sarfati’s lens, with its Eggleston-style lines and compositions, the outward personas of these slim, attractive women start to unravel, and a discomfiting darkness emerges. A shot of Christine topless in the desert takes on new meaning when it is revealed that she is high on magic mushrooms, as does the shot where she is wearing a wedding dress – a garment that she owns yet has never worn for real. Sasha, who only appears twice, is palpably uncomfortable in the camera’s glare, and Sloane, who appears most frequently, is shown in a number of different guises; wigs and make-up transforming her appearance but never muting the shadows lurking behind her eyes.

Why? Sarfati is adept at placing herself on the peripheries of others’ lives, capturing deceptively simple images that, on closer inspection, exude a strangeness, an alienation, that belies their superficial banality. The four characters in the series, related by blood, similar in physique and appearance, are fashioned into what Sarfati describes as “a woman with four heads.” Despite always being shot separately, they are inextricably intertwined with each other: with questions formed and answers given by the offsetting of their differences, and the tensions of their similarities. Through this, Sarfati has created not simply

French-born Lise Sarfati has lived and worked in the United States since 2003. She has produced six important series of photographs in America, each followed by major exhibitions. They include The New Life (2003), Austin, Texas (2008), She (2005-2009), Immaculate (2006-2007), Sloane (2009), and On Hollywood (2010). Two upcoming shows of her third series, She, will open shortly in London and in L.A., with a Twin Palms monograph to follow in the Spring, 2012.

Publisher Jack Woody (Twin Palms) confided about Sarfati’s work, "When I look at the women in her photographs I suspect in some way they are all self-portraits. Lise sees in these women an incredible endurance, confronting their circumstances across the surfaces of the indifferent western landscape they have come to occupy."

I interviewed Lise as she was just leaving to hang her exhibition in London.

E A R L Y L I F E

What were your earliest photographs and influences?

When I was 13 years old, my mother would take me with her when she visited elderly women in their big, old apartments in Nice. The sight of these women made me anxious so I turned these visits into a game. I borrowed a 6×6 camera from my sister and would take a portrait of the old women and their apartment while my mother talked with them. I already had a serial, conceptual approach. Photography allowed me to create a fixed image that removed me from reality and allowed me to have a different relationship with the world. When the women died, my mother would go back to their apartments and I would photograph the empty rooms.

My second subject was the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, a much more linear approach while following the promenade.

My father made Super 8 Kodachrome films, which I loved. I remember being very sensitive to the emotion provoked by the colors, the sequences. My mother was a professor of literature. Her main job was writing and literary criticism. At 15, my mother gave me the Diane Arbus monograph published by Editions du Chêne.

We lived on top of Roman ruins. The vegetation in the garden where we lived, the light in Nice which is very harsh, the combined vision of baroque beauty and the decomposition of individuals, I wonder if the chemistry between the setting, the old people, adolescents and the Italian border wasn’t some kind of explosion.

Photography did not really exist at the time; we did not get a daily stream of photographs. We would only find books in black and white published by Robert Delpire or Les Editions du Chêne, like Stieglitz, Robert Frank, Cartier-Bresson. Photography appeared as an exception, a mystery.

E A R L Y W O R K

Your work has a cinematic quality to it sometimes. Where did you study and how did your Fine Art career begin?

I completed a Masters in Russian at the Sorbonne, in Paris. I learned to photograph by myself, reading books and through my professional practice at the Académie des Beaux-Arts. I studied film on my own, if you can call it studying, by going to see movies like those by Dziga Vertov, Jean Eustache, Robert Bresson, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Alain Resnais. I spent a year in Aix en Provence and worked in a gallery that only exhibited photography. Then I was hired by the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris (Institute de France) and I did all the photographs for their exhibit catalogues. I reproduced master paintings by Monet, Dali and others.

I spoke Russian. I wanted to experience the country’s disruption up close and I moved there in the 1990’s.

I was fascinated by Russia and the revolutionary periods, particularly the 1920s, the avant-garde and their history.

My first show was at the CNP in Paris and the Musée Nicéphore Niepce in Châlon sur Saône, (France).

I received the Villa Medicis and Niepce awards for my work on Russia. The Niepce Prize came with an exhibit at the Centre National de la Photographie (CNP) in Paris, the equivalent of the Jeu de Paume today. But the real catalyst was The New Life in 2003.

I moved to the United States to create The New Life in 2003. I relished the feeling of being a foreigner.

My first galleries were Yossi Milo Gallery (New York) and Rose Gallery (Los Angeles) where I showed The New Life.

S H E

What was your intention behind your series, SHE?

The ordinary and the singular. Universality. Anti-heroines. Projections and situations.

In my last series in Russia, there were a lot of adolescent characters and I was already working on landscape.

I learned the relationship with landscape in Russia , where it is very strong since man is dominated by nature. Man is insignificant. My series The New Life and She reinforced this approach. The adolescent in The New Life or the sisters in She are subterranean beings, moles through which narration exists like in a novel.

The women in She have a vaporous relationship with their surrounding, their house, their streets, and their landscapes. They are shut in their neurotic attitude from where it is difficult to perceive the outside world.

My intention was to show a bit of the futility of our daily life, the simplicity of situations and our movements in our environment and to oppose this simplicity to another field: that of interiority, emotion, psychological relationships. It is to receive the emotion (of the 4 women) and to mix them with mine. I also had autobiographical elements that allowed me to situate myself emotionally: I have 3 sisters.
My point of view was not generic but I wanted to be immersed in a particular story between four women from the same family. This story had to have a generational dimension.

While The New Life recounts the feelings of adolescence and the attraction to the void, She evokes a sense of identity, a mirror. In The New Life the characters spoke to each other as one. They projected a profound melancholia. In She Christine and Gina are older, about 40 years of age, while Sloane and Sasha are younger, around 20. They are all sisters.

Christine, the mother is the axis of this construction, the only woman who tries to satisfy her dreams. At first married to a Jehovah’s Witness in Arizona, she leaves her husband and her two daughters to live a fully liberated sexual life and becomes a dominatrix on the west coast. Then, she projects herself into a new dream: to become a rock star.

Gina cultivates a masculine/feminine sexual ambiguity and wears a black wig to look like her sister Christine. Sloane, Christine’s daughter, changes her appearance constantly going from a blond wig to discolored hair. She has been a nanny for two years. Sasha, Sloane’s sister, is perpetually depressed, enclosed in her cocoon and inclined to melancholia.

I was not interested in these biographical details when I decided to do the series. I was interested in merging two approaches: that of the ordinary and the singular.

The classic image of the mother is that of a woman drowned by the love for her little one. In She however, the mother, the daughter, the sister and the other sister can be rivals or enemies, competitors or indifferent.

We are in a small provincial town in the USA, downtown Oakland, where there are beautiful Victorian Mansions in the ghetto, with magnificent chimneys and dining rooms.

These sisters did not make it easy which made them alive and attractive.

The photographs and artifacts in the rooms are especially interesting.

The environment is an important element. Christine is photographed in Oakland in the ghetto in a house she shares with a roommate. We meet Sloane in the ghetto in Oakland in the house of a friend of her mother’s. All these houses look alike with their wooden windows and their chimneys. They are the interiors of Hopper paintings. We see Gina coming out of a grocery store, these are environments linked to the 1970s. The only images of projection that are out of the ordinary are those of Christine in the desert.

How do you perceive your use of color in your work?

I have an inner sense of color. I do not even think about it. I do believe color gives a special meaning to my work. The color gives balance or imbalance to an image or sets a mood if the image is monochrome.

I worked with film stock that no longer exists (Kodachrome 64), the first color film used for Hollywood movies in the 1940s. All the photographs were shot in natural light without any outside source.

B O O K S

How did you meet Twin Palms publisher Jack Woody?

I met Jack through David Stretell who showed him my series The New Life that Twin Palms published in 2005. Jack is a complex and mysterious character. I very much admire his work and his publications. Also, everything he initiated; Roni Horn, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Eggleston, Mapplethorpe, Jean Luc Mylayne…now Ryan McGinley and Antonio Lopez. He built his collection by mixing known and unknown artists with complete freedom and according to his beliefs. It is a work of art in itself, like a private collection. Jack links the books he publishes to his life and his aspirations. And knowing his books, we wander from a feeling of total freedom to a permanent sentiment of immaturity, melancholia, asserted sexuality mingled with an obsession with death.

What has been your experience working on books?

I made The New Life with Twin Palms and the book was released very quickly. I was lucky. Everything flowed. I think we completed the whole project in 4 months. I think with She it is a bit longer but it should be ready in May 2012. One doesn’t realize it, but a book is like a war machine.

Tell me about your upcoming Retrospective at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris in 2014.

The curator is Anne Biroleau. The exhibition will be centered on my recent work in the USA. It will be a very important show with several series. It is hard to say how it came about. I always showed my work to Anne Biroleau who accepted to enter my universe and open up to my work. I also very much admire her work as a curator.

Née en France, Lise Sarfati vit et travaille aux Etats-Unis depuis 2003. Elle a réalisé 6 séries majeures: The New Life (2003), Austin, Texas (2008), She (2005-2009), Immaculate (2006-2007), Sloane (2009), et On Hollywood (2010). Sa série She sera prochainement exposée à Londres et Los Angeles, avec une monographie publiée chez Twin Palms au Printemps 2012.

Publisher Jack Woody (Twin Palms) confided about Sarfati’s work, "When I look at the women in her photographs I suspect in some way they are all self-portraits. Lise sees in these women an incredible endurance, confronting their circumstances across the surfaces of the indifferent western landscape they have come to occupy."

Voici l'interview de Lise Sarfati par Elizabeth Avedon:

E N F A N C E

A quel âge avez-vous réalisé vos premières photographies et quelles ont été vos premières influences ?

Lorsque j'avais 13 ans, ma mère visitait de très vieilles dames dans des appartements niçois et elle m'amenait avec elle. La vision de ces femmes m'angoissait : aussi je décidais de transformer ces visites en un jeu. J'empruntais le 6X6 de ma soeur et je me suis organisée : je faisais un portrait de la vieille dame, ensuite je m'occupais de photographier l'appartement pendant que ma mère discutait avec elle. Finalement, j'avais une approche sérielle et conceptuelle. La photographie me permettait de créer une image fixe qui me détachait du réel et qui me permettait d'entretenir un autre rapport au monde. Quelquefois, une des vieilles dames mourait ...Il arrivait que ma mère revienne dans l'appartement pour une raison obscure car elle en possédait une clef. Je l'accompagnais avec mon appareil photo et photographiais les pièces vides...

Mon deuxième sujet fut la Promenade des Anglais à Nice, un travail beaucoup plus linéaire en suivant la promenade.

Mon père faisait des films super 8 kodachrome que j'adorais. Je me souviens avoir été très sensible à l'émotion provoquée par les couleurs et aux plans séquences...
Ma mère était professeur de littérature, son activité principale était l'écriture et la critique littéraire. A 15 ans, ma mère m'a offert la monographie de Diane Arbus aux éditions du Chêne.
Nous vivions sur des ruines romaines. La végétation du jardin, la lumière de Nice très crue, la vision de ce mélange de beauté baroque et de décomposition des individus, je ne sais pas si la chimie entre le décor, les vieux, les adolescents et la frontière avec l'Italie n'était pas une sorte d'explosif...

La photographie n'existait pas vraiment à cette époque. On pouvait juste tomber sur des livres en noir et blanc édités par Robert Delpire ou les éditions du Chêne comme Stieglitz, Robert Frank, Cartier Bresson...L'époque n'était pas au déferlement quotidien des photographies et des livres, la photographie se révèlait comme une exception, un mystère.

P R E M I E R E S O E U V R E S

Vos oeuvres ont parfois une dimension cinématographique. Où avez-vous étudié, et quand votre carrière artistique a-t-elle débutée ?

J'ai fait une maîtrise de russe à la Sorbonne à Paris. J'ai appris la photographie seule avec des livres et aussi par ma pratique professionelle à l'Académie des Beaux-Arts. J'ai étudié le cinéma seule, si on peut appeler cela étudier en allant voir des films comme ceux de Dziga Vertov, Jean Eustache , Robert Bresson ,Pier Paolo Pasolini, Alain Resnais. J'ai passé un an à Aix en Provence et j'ai travaillé dans une galerie qui ne montrait que de la photographie. Ensuite, j'ai été engagée par l'Académie des Beaux-Arts à Paris (Institut de France), je faisais toutes les photographies des catalogues d'exposition. Je reproduisais des toiles de maîtres comme Monet, Dali et d'autres...

Je parlais russe. Je voulais vivre les bouleversements du pays .Je me suis installée en Russie dans les années 90. J'étais fascinée par la Russie et les périodes révolutionnaires plus particulièrement les années 20, celle de l'avant-garde et de son histoire.

Mon premier show fut au Centre National de la Photographie à Paris et au Musée Nicéphore Niepce à Châlon sur Saône (France).

J'ai obtenu avec mon travail russe le prix de la Villa Medicis et le Prix Niepce. Le Prix Niepce était accompagné d'une exposition au Centre national de la photographie à Paris, l'équivalent du Jeu de Paume à présent. Mais l'élément déclencheur fut The New Life en 2003.

Je me suis installée aux Etats-Unis pour créer The New Life en 2003. J’étais heureuse d’être un étranger et de savourer cet état.Ma première Galerie fut Yossi Milo Gallery (à New York) et Rose Gallery(Los Angeles) où j'ai exposé The New Life.

S H E

Quelles étaient vos intentions en réalisant la série SHE ?

Banalité et singularité. Universalité. Anti-héroïnes. Projections et Situations.

Dans mes dernières séries en Russie, je commençais à composer des narrations avec des personnages adolescents et je travaillais déjà sur l'espace. J'ai appris en Russie le rapport à l'espace qui est très fort car l'homme est dominé par la nature. Il est insignifiant. Puis ma série The New Life et She ont renforcé cette approche. Pour moi, l'adolescent de The New Life ou les soeurs de She sont des êtres souterrains, des taupes par lesquels la narration existe au même titre qu'un roman.

Les femmes de She ont une relation évaporée à leur milieu, leur maison, leurs rues, leurs paysages...Elles sont enfermées dans un comportement névrotique où il est difficile d'entrevoir le monde extérieur.

Mon intention était de montrer un peu la futilité de notre quotidien, la simplicité des situations et de nos gestes dans notre environnement et d’opposer à cette simplicité un autre champs: celui de l'intériorité, de l'émotion, de la relation psychologique...

Je voulais recevoir leurs émotions et les mêler aux miennes. J'avais aussi des éléments autobiographiques qui me permettaient de me situer émotionnellement, j'ai trois soeurs.

Mon point de vue n'était pas généraliste, je voulais être enfermée dans une histoire très particulière entre 4 femmes de la même famille. Cette histoire devait avoir une portée générationnelle.

Si The New Life retrace le sentiment d'adolescence et cette attirance pour le vide ...She parle d'un sentiment d'identité, d'un miroir...

Dans The New life, les personnages se répondaient pour ne faire qu'un. Ils dégageaient une mélancolie profonde... Dans She, Christine et Gina sont plus âgées, elles ont environ 40 ans alors que les plus jeunes, Sloane et Sasha ont 20 ans. Ce sont toutes des soeurs.

Christine, la mère est le pivot de cette construction, la seule femme qui essaie d'assouvir ses rêves. D’abord mariée à un témoin de Jehova en Arizona ,elle quitte son mari et ses deux filles pour vivre une vie de liberté sexuelle et devient dominatrice sur la côte Ouest. Puis elle se projette dans un nouveau rêve : celui de devenir une rock star.

Gina cultive une ambiguïté sexuelle masculin/féminin et porte une perruque noire pour ressembler à sa soeur, Sloane, la fille de Christine change d'apparence constamment et passe d'une perruque blonde à des cheveux décolorés. Elle est nanny depuis deux ans. Sasha, la soeur de Sloane, est perpétuellement déprimée, retranchée dans son cocon est encline à la mélancolie.

Je n'ai pas eu envie de connaître ces détails biographiques lorque j'ai decidé de faire cette série. Ce qui m'intéressait, c'était de mêler deux approches : celle de la banalité et celle de la singularité.

L'image classique de la mère est qu'elle se noie dans l'amour pour son enfant. Or dans She, la mère, la fille et la soeur peuvent être rivales ou ennemies ou tout simplement concurrentes ou indifférentes.

Nous sommes dans une petite ville de province aux Etats-Unis, le downtown d'Oakland avec des maisons victoriennes sublimes du ghetto et les cheminées magnifiques des salles à manger....

Les soeurs ne se laissaient pas trop faire, ce qui les rendaient vivantes et attirantes.

Les photographies et les objets présents dans la pièce sont particulièrement intéressants.

L'environnement est un élément très important. Christine est photographiée à Oakland dans le ghetto dans une maison qu'elle partage comme roommate. On retrouve Sloane dans le ghetto d'Oakland dans la maison d'un ami de sa mère. Toutes ces maisons se ressemblent avec leurs fenêtres en bois et leurs cheminées. Ce sont les intérieurs des peintures de Hooper. On voit Gina sortant d'une épicerie, ce sont des environnements liés aux années 70. Les seules images de projection qui sortent de la banalité sont les images de Christine dans le désert.

Comment envisagez-vous l'usage de la couleur dans votre travail ?

J'ai le sens inné de la couleur, je ne me pose même pas de questions. Je pense que la couleur donne un sens à mon travail. C'est la couleur qui donne un équilibre ou un déséquilibre à l'image ou un mood si l'image est monochrome.

J'ai travaillé avec un film qui n'existe plus, le kodachrome 64, premier film utilisé pour les films d'Hollywood des années 40. Toutes les photographies ont été réalisées en lumière naturelle sans aucun apport extérieur.

L I V R E S

Comment avez-vous rencontré l'éditeur de Twin Palms Jack Woody ?

J'ai rencontré Jack par l'intermédiaire de David Stretell qui lui a montré ma série. The New Life que Twin Palms a publié en 2005. Jack est un personnage complexe et mystérieux. Je suis très admirative de son oeuvre, de ses publications et de tout ce qu'il a initié. Roni Horn, Philip Lorca Di Corcia, Eggleston, Mappelthorpe, Jean Luc Mylyane, récemment Ryan Mc Ginley et Antonio Lopez. Il a construit sa collection en mélangeant artistes connus et inconnus au gré de sa liberté et de ses convictions. C’est une oeuvre d’art en soi, comme une collection privée. Jack aime lier les livres qu'il publie à sa vie et à ses aspirations. Et en connaissant ses Iivres, on se balade d'un sentiment de totale liberté à un sentiment de permanente immaturité, de mélancolie, d'une sexualité toujours affirmée mélee d'obssessions sur la mort.

Quelle ont été vos impressions, en travaillant sur ces livres ?

J'ai réalisé The New Life avec Twin Palms et le livre est sorti très vite. J'ai eu de la chance. Tout s'est enchainé. Nous avons fait tout le livre en 4 mois. Pour She, c'est un peu plus long, mais il devrait être prêt en Mai 2012. Un livre, on ne se rend pas compte, mais c'est une véritable machine de guerre.

Parlez-moi de votre rétrospective à venir à la Bibliothèque Nationale, à Paris, en 2014.

La commissaire est Anne Biroleau. L'exposition sera centrée sur mon travail récent réalisé aux Etats-Unis. Ce sera une exposition importante avec plusieurs séries. Difficile de dire comment cela est arrive, j'ai toujours montré régulièrement mon travail à Anne Biroleau qui a bien voulu entrer dans mon univers et s'ouvrir à mon travail. Je suis aussi très admirative de son travail de conservatrice.

Lise Sarfati is a French photographer who lived and worked in Russia for 10 years before relocating to California in 2003. To date, her subjects have tended to be adolescents and her colour portraits, which often resemble film stills, evoke the strange sense of suspended time between youth and adulthood. Sarfati's obsession with the inner lives of the young and dislocated is not, of itself, anything new: both Rineke Dijkstra and Larry Clark have explored similar terrain. But Sarfati's photographs, though deceptively simple on first viewing, have a mysterious quality that is to do, in part, with her deft merging of portraiture, snapshot and arranged tableau.

As a teenager, she studied the films of Robert Bresson, Alain Resnais and the Russian documentary pioneer and film theorist, Dziga Vertov. Her work, she says, is as much influenced by film and by theoretical thinkers such as Julia Kristeva as by any photographic precursors. Sarfati, then, is a very French kind of conceptualist, but, since moving to America, she has sought out small-town communities in California, where the pace of life is slow and where she can take the time to familiarise herself with the people that subsequently become actors in her semi-choreographed still-life scenarios. She refers to them revealingly as "characters that might exist in a novel".

This exhibition, entitled She, follows on from her other American projects, which include The New Life (2003), Austin, Texas (2008) and On Hollywood (2010). It is set in a run-down area of Oakland, California and features two middle-aged women, Christine and Gina, in its small cast. They are sisters, as are Sloane and Sasha, Christine's daughters. In the exhibition's press release, Sarfati writes: "I like doubles, like mothers and daughters, or sisters or reflections. This represents my research into women's identities... I am interested in fixing that instability."

I completed a Masters in Russian at the Sorbonne, in Paris. I learned to photograph by myself, reading books and through my professional practice at the Académie des Beaux-Arts. I studied film on my own, if you can call it studying, by going to see movies like those by Dziga Vertov, Jean Eustache, Robert Bresson, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Alain Resnais. I spent a year in Aix en Provence and worked in a gallery that only exhibited photography. Then I was hired by the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris (Institute de France) and I did all the photographs for their exhibit catalogues. I reproduced master paintings by Monet, Dali and others. The notion of "instability" is a constant here, as are the behavioural fault lines and tremors that run like invisible currents though the generations. Of the four, Sloane is the most traditionally photogenic, and the one whose portraits most resemble film stills. One could easily imagine her haunting a David Lynch movie in the manner of Patricia Arquette in Lost Highway. Her sister, Sasha, appears only twice, and seems the most ill at ease with Sarfati's camera. When I walked around the show with Sarfati last week, she told me that all the women were difficult to photograph because they remained constantly suspicious of the camera's gaze, as well they might.

As always, Sarfati does not attempt to create a narrative strand, preferring, instead, to hint obliquely at the often dark undercurrents in her subjects' lives. Gina, like Sloane, can look like a different person from one portrait to the next, and her sexual identity, too, seems fluid. Christine comes across as someone who has lived life hard and fast and, in middle age, with two troubled teenage daughters, is living that way still. She is an erstwhile Jehovah's Witness turned dominatrix, whose ambition is to be a rock star.

In one striking image, she is wearing a wedding dress and veil, a reminder of a marriage that never happened. In another, she is pictured topless in the desert at dusk, her intense gaze looking into and beyond the camera. This is one of the few instances when Sarfati captures a subject head on, but, again, nothing is revealed here except Christine's otherness and her sense of isolation. What Sarfati seems to be aiming for is the capturing of a state of mind, one which is usually dislocated, daydreamy or preoccupied.

The photographs are given an extra layer of unrealness by Sarfati's use of Kodachrome slide film, which is more synonymous with family snapshots from the 1960s and 70s. There are echoes of William Eggleston's early colour images in some of her landscapes, but her work is all her own in its evocation of a certain kind of suspended, and insular, reality.

All four women live tough lives in an area where poverty is the norm, but, again, this is suggested rather than spelled out. Sarfati's US publisher, Jack Woody of Twin Palms books, recently said: "Lise sees in these women an incredible endurance, confronting their circumstances across the surfaces of the indifferent western landscape they have come to occupy," adding: "When I look at the women in her photos, I suspect in some way they are all self-portraits."

While all this may be true, it is not immediately apparent in the photographs, whose power lies in part in their elusiveness. Interestingly, Sarfati began taking photographs at 13, when she accompanied her mother, an academic who was then researching a novel on ageing, to the homes of old women who lived in big, eerily empty apartments in Nice. The camera may have provided her younger self with a way of dealing with these strange encounters. It also, as she said in a recent interview, "allowed me to create a fixed image that removed me from reality and allowed me to have a different relationship with the world". That would still seem to be the case, though the childlike wonder has been replaced by a more knowing gaze that may seem, at first encounter, to be blank and detached, but is anything but.

Robert Wiedenfeld: Initially how did the concept develop for The New Life (La Vie Nouvelle)?

Lise Sarfati: I just wanted to go to the States and to work there. I loved the feeling of my body in this space felt free. I decided to do a road trip and to produce it myself. François came with me. I had no idea what I wanted to do. Just a road trip from the east to the west like in the american tradition of photography but not with the same spirit. I realized quickly the circulation of people was quite strange as in Europe we are more used to seeing people walking in the streets and appropriating themselves to the space (similar to the theory of the situationist regarding Psychogeography), or they were at home or at school or in their car, sometimes you see somebody at a gas station. Very quick the concept came to photograph young characters inside their home, in their garden and in the store next door.The concept also of a series came to me as I did not think about individual photographs. I wanted the frame of the work to stay in a very day to day life depiction of the middle class environment so that the people who looked at the photos could properly identify themselves. My questions were more geared towards how will I choose the characters? How will they have a connection between themselves and what was interesting to me really! Very quickly I decided to focus on a very challenging series with lots of ideas. The way a young person projects herself into another dimension, in another body, in another dream ... the exact movement of the projection. So we spent one week together François and I going around exploring different scenarios. Suddenly when I tried to speak with people they would not answer me. So there we were completely isolated in America while the US was at war. My perception was that people did not like so much the French people. As a result I began to say that I was from Belgium. The problem was that people did not know where Belgium was and it appeared to be an imaginary country for them. I also took an assistant along with us so that we could connect with the people faster. In order to connect with the people I would just point to him or her. So I didn't have to waste my time in explaining who we were all the time. During the whole trip I never saw my films and never knew what I was doing in order to go further I had everything in my mind because I wanted to stay in a suspended mood. I did not want to stop similar to an obsession as if I were writing a book. The fact that I never saw any of my films was very important for me. This was the first time also that I inaugurated this way of working I had absolutely no model regarding this ... This was something new for me also unknown that is why I was so excited.

RW: You have pursued youth in many countries throughout the world. What is your fascination with youth?

LS: Yes, that came from my inside feeling of being myself young even if I was not. Also it was a way for me to come back to a certain emotion that I only felt when I was young. By photographing youth I could take all my time to feel those same emotions again. I remember very well my sense of freedom as a child. However mainly I was very influenced by Witold Gombrowicz in particular his idea of perpetual (never ending) adolescence, his approach to the (human) form and by his persistence to have an adolescence like the subject of his narration. Also in russian literature for example Dostoievskyi the youth is nearly always predominant as it is in Robert Bresson films. The youth I met before in Russia when I did my series with boys were mainly young prostitutes which came from the surburbs to Moscow so they were adolescents but also they were living a real extreme experience ... This tension between their life and their body and the atmosphere of never ending destruction took me to this theme. The way I worked on young characters with The New Life was completely different and I could have in me the russian experience. With The New Life the environment was already predetermined so I could focus more on the characters at hand.

RW: Lise one of my personal favorites from The New Life is Suzannah #23 Hillsboro,Or 2003. Upon first seeing this picture my memory jogged back to a very short story that I read in high school called, "The Yellow Wallpaper". For me this image is perfection she almost appears to have just got off a ghost train of sorts... Also I love the strange little apparition that mysteriously appears just above the door frame in the top right corner of the picture. I just wonder how you so effortlessly construct these images that contain somehow a real emotional vacuum... Even if you artificially manifested this mirage i still maintain that you possess the mirror of a genuine clairvoyant... Could you please deconstruct this image step by step?

LS: I met Suzannah in Portland at an art school where she was enrolled at the time. My first thought was that she was very very shy and very classical. As soon as I saw her I liked her. We did not speak too much. I was surprised she agreed to have her picture taken as I did not make such an effort to convince her. When we arrived to her house I was fascinated by the beauty of the house as I had never previously seen such a beautifully crafted house during our whole trip while traveling for The New Life. Everything was handmade from wood, there was a beautiful crafted staircase between the two floors. The living room was very rich in colours and very old fashioned. I remember the windows in the living room were traditional beveled leaded glass windows typical of the craftsman type homes in Oregon. Her mother was sewing dresses, old fashion dresses with very interesting cloth and I resisted to look at her work instead choosing to stay distant and focused on Suzannah. Suzannah was wearing this unusual yellowish mustard colored dress that presumably her mother made for her. I photographed her in every room not asking so much, especially in the bedrooms. I remember that she blushed became red during the shooting. For this particular shot we were in the kitchen where she naturally touched the glass of water. This was her natural instinct. Nothing was arranged you can see all this plastic and paper behind her that I did not touch. I did like that the plan was so large and so horizontal also I thought it was a nice touch that the arrière-plan was behind her. This picture was made during the day and I remember the way she put her hand on the pleats of her dress... She was very quiet and her hair was obscuring her face.

RW: There is a real sense of continuity projected in all of your work whether the pictures were taken in Russia, China, France, or USA. Can you please speak about cohesiveness and the importance of authorship regarding your own personal work?

LS: I make all the works I do belonging to my own identity instead of being an observation of the world. My own experience drives me and I realize that my experiences of life were perceived more through the eyes of my youth rather than adulthood. I am interested in all sorts of projections. Also I will never do a mise en scène which will go only from my imagination or my mind I will use the potential of the personage to give me a lot of possibilities and I will take a lot from either he or she. My specificity will be to choose the good personage as Robert Bresson did in his movies, not professional actors, never models but encounters that have never been photographed before. When I was living in Russia much of my work was based on a mise en abîme of natural landscapes and stills mixed in a poetic way with my personnages. The main difference being that when I worked in the States I was primarily focused on personages.

RW: In The New Life series you refer to the girls as characters and the person in charge of the wardrobe as a costumer... Can you explain the roles of both?

LS: When I did The New Life the girls and boys I met were my personages that is true but I did not have anybody managing their outfits with me. I could not think of changing anything in their clothes as their outfits represent a certain richness for me. I met a lot of girls who were very frustrated and they could only express themselves through the clothes they wear or through a color or a way to put their hair. I never asked them to change their clothes. The Austin, Texas series was something else as it was a commission of fashion work with a costumiere from Paris. I said to Leila think you are a costumiere and not a stylist it will help us to get where we need to be in terms of style.

RW: The use of analogous colors in your work is very distinct and as a result plays a very important role in all of your pictures. Could you describe the relationships between colours in your work?

LS: I work a lot on colors. When I began photography I was the photographer for the Academie des Beaux- Arts in Paris where I was doing reproductions of paintings. I spent a lot of time photographing with a view camera Monet, Dali amongst other academicians for the entire catalogue of the Académie... I had a palette of colors for mixing and matching in order to find the right color... When I am doing my prints my printer goes crazy as I could feel a point of a red or yellow or magenta... I am very sensible about color perhaps because I spent all of my childhood in Nice in the south of France near the sun with a lots of white and blue. Then I went for the first time to Russia I was only 15 and visited the border of The Black Sea. I discovered the grey and I was fascinated by this world of no colour a very sad world... When I came to America the color was everywhere and it gave me happiness I embraced this. I feel color like I breathe colour is my element.

RW: Which painters either modern or classical do you look towards for inspiration?

LS: I love the Russian artists from the 1920´s for example Alexei Kruchenykh, Kazamir Malévich, Natalia Goncharova I love a lot abstraction, mainly Russian Suprematism but also I care for drawings. My masters for a long time have been Hans Bellmer and Unica Zurn for her drawings. I also like Fra Angelico and Giotto and a lot of other different painters so the list would be really long...

RW: Your pictures reflect a certain cinematic aura. I feel at times when looking as though I´m in the middle of a great movie while wondering what will happen next. Is part of what your trying to project similar to the approach of the mise-en-scène used by cinematographers?

LS: That is right. What will happen next is a good introduction to my photography. I would like the viewer to actively participate in the image. Of course I would be happy if the viewer could identify herself in the image also and do not look at it like a spectacle... I think the feeling comes from the series rather than an individual image. I have been educated by Robert Bresson who elaborated the theory of the models instead of the actors. He said that the actors were doing theater and that we need real people, real emotions and he asks that the personage will find themselves in the real life repeating a text about 10 times in order to let the real emotion keep going... (that is what I feel too). The difference is that Bresson uses text while I don´t! The Text is in my brain (...) and I just project myself towards the personnage that I meet and it works all the time we just connect... Sometimes some are dominating me sometimes I influence them but all the time something is happening and they will never forget that we met one day...

RW: Did you ever encounter a certain level of ethnocentric behavior exhibited by those subjects that you portray in The New Life Series?

LS: Yes in a way if ethnocentrism means to be an observer of my cultural group. I try to focus on an observation of personages that mirror my own world or upbringing. These are mainly middle class from metropolitan cities. Additionally my work is not too much social. The girls and the boys of The New Life are those I am drawn to naturally however some are from very poor families while others maintain a middle class background. For example Terri was living in a trailer with her mother in Portland, Oregon. Madeleine was from a richer family from Berkeley and Gaelyn was living in New Orleans in a wooden house with only her mother who was a nurse and with her older sister... I found a lot of common denominators between all the personages and I felt that they were living the same life more or less and shared the same emotions. Their limits were based on their environments and on their circulation from their private homes to their school. Often the girls and boys that I have photographed were living in houses with their parents. They were mainly adolescents however what attracted me to them is that they all suffered a lot as well as sharing a certain propensity towards insecurity. The question for them is often Who am I? Where am I coming from? What do I want? Exactly like the personages of Anton Tchékov in the 3 sisters. This is also why I decided to call my series The New Life as the notion came from Vita Nova by Dante.

RW: You seem to have a predisposition a knack for always choosing the right subjects while harmoniously weaving them into their own respective environments ... In The New Life you appear to be inventing your own americana picture by picture... industrial malaise, urban vortexes, suburban sprawl, etc... How much of your process relies on serendipity?

LS: I think that I feel comfortable choosing the people I am working with. I feel them I feel that they have a little aura which creates a potential of freedom and a possibility to do a photograph. More so what I like best is the creative moment when I found somebody in a relationship with somebody else I met before in another city in another state... That way for all time they will have something in common difficult to analyse like a magic circle that you cannot go through. I love to find my own signs inside the environment and to create my own universe which is becoming most important for me more and more as the world seems to me quite the same everywhere. I remember arriving in the states I chose what were the most significant themes for me at once and then step by step I discovered the small details. I enjoyed the environments as much as the personages. My love is equal for the both... Before I was photographing separately the two, one time a thing or a landscape and one time a personage then I associated the two which was the case in my russian work especially demonstrated in my show in Salamanca, Spain and also the catalogue. Beginning with The New Life I felt good combining the two together and I felt that my photography was much more complex also adding a certain richness at the same time. In that way I could associate signs to personage in the same image while simultaneously being precise also the idea of the personage and the importance of the context...

RW: Could you describe the process of how you went about assimilating the sequence for The New Life book ?

LS: When I came back I never saw my photographs everything was shot with slides and I was really excited to discover the work entirely all at once. Initially I was of course scared to look as I knew that everything must be done with the edit. I wondered just how I would go about constructing the sequence. My time spent on editing and re-editing was very minimal. The decision came to me to introduce personages which gave a disequilibriance to the series like Fenya... Finally when I showed my work afterwards in galleries the collectors were focused mainly on very specific images which was not the same way I was looking at the work.

RW: Please describe the delicate balance between background and foreground in all of your pictures... What is your mental process or rather the internal dialogue that you have with yourself before pressing the shutter?

LS: I am fascinated by the combination of the surrounding and the personage. I acquired this skill when I was in Russia while I was doing strictly documentary photography. Then I worked on myself trying to understand what was the personage, what was the surrounding or the landscape and my specificity came from this balance. I recognize for myself the language regarding the relationship of which the subject has to the world .

RW: You shared that one of your main influences is the brilliant filmmaker Robert Bresson for various reasons. Bresson has stated that the number one rule to art is unity. He has also freely admitted to shooting the same scene again and again apparently looking for various nuances in the performance of the actors I suspect. How does this technique specifically reshoots differ from how you worked on The New Life? Typically how many rolls of film will you expose to feel confident that you have what you set out to get?

LS: Bresson was totally against actors and never used professional actors. He used only real people that he found in various places. One of his ways to realize his films was to choose a text like a novel of Dostoievskyi, adapt it to the reality of contemporary France and then ask the personnage (he calls him the model) to read the text but not to play it. For The New Life I did not shoot many rolls on each character around 3. I was concerned that my subjects would become tired of me quickly. In retrospect when I think about it I did not use much film. We just made appointments for the shoots everything was quite natural although I was mostly silent which must have been somewhat disturbing for the subject I guess. I already had the layout in my mind before I began the shoot. When I shoot I just take the pictures to have confirmation of what I already anticipated however sometimes of course this approach does not work. The personage I expected verses the one I ended up with is often very different from girl to girl... The problem is that my way of working has so many limits on which I am depending on where so much of the emphasis relies on the emotion of the person I photograph.

RW: Cinema has always been a close relative of photography... In theory if you were given a budget free of constraints and were able to work under your own circumstances which kind of film would you make?

LS: Perhaps a black and white film becoming a color one something about the movement of the personages in the city... I would need to think about something close to my photographic works... I will write a scenario possibly taking place in a eastern country mixed to another one...

RW: You have a multitude of ideas regarding the female identity words such as internalizing, projections, intangible concepts, duality, and transversal themes. In your own words what defines femininity for you?

LS: For me femininity is to approach themes where women are shown in their relationship to the world, between themselves and in the way they struggle for their life in the society. I am interested by the body and the psyché of the woman I am also interested in maternity and in the relationship of the woman as a species. In The New Life series the life of the adolescent typically expresses a certain boredom to the exterior world. In extreme cases this effect can climax into a big melodrama similar to the Columbine tragedy.

RW: You have stated that films can be more interesting although according to you the still image is more terrifying... What do you mean precisely?

LS: For the moment I am more interested in fixed images as it is easier to realize than films which require lots of money... I spend so much time to finalize a project between the time I finish my series and the time I am publishing a book and doing my show. For The New Life everything went very quick the series was done in 2003, the Book published in 2005, and my first show was in London before the publication of the book. Finally I did a lot of shows with the series and I was very happy with the outcome as the public reaction was wonderful with lots of positive feedback from the shows.

Dans l'atelier parisien de Rick Owens, que pouvaient se raconter ce Californien établi en France depuis des années et Lise Sarfati, cette Française qui parcourt les Etats-Unis? Des histoires de matières, de formes et d'adolescences, de pâtisserie et d'excentricité. Entre terrasse et intérieur, où chassés par la pluie ils se réfugièrent, Lise et Rick dessinèrent, ensemble, les contours (é)mouvants d'une première rencontre.

Lise Sarfati : Mon idée maîtresse, pour ce Fashion Magazine, consistait à jouer entre intérieur et extérieur, entre la maison de chaque fille photographiée et son alentour. Du lit au jardin, en quelque sorte. La série qui ouvre le journal commence avec cette fille, Sasha, qui a quitté son Texas natal pour vivre dans une forêt californienne avec la « Rainbow Family ».

Rick Owens : La « Rainbow family »? Une famille métissée ?

Lise Sarfati : Non, c'est une communauté de personnes qui décident de vivre sans la contrainte de l'argent, de manière nomade, en dehors de la société. Je les imaginais hippies mais une fois sur place, j'ai constaté qu'ils avaient tous des chiens, qu'ils entretenaient à dessein une certaine sauvagerie : ne jamais se laver, fumer de l'herbe toute la journée. C'était leur façon de vivre, une sorte de communaute tribale.

Rick Owens : Comment les avez-vous convaincus de se laisser photographier ?

Lise Sarfati : J'avais rencontré Sasha deux ans auparavant à Austin, Texas, et elle vivait alors dans une très belle maison. Il y a quelques mois, avant d'y retourner, j'ai téléphoné à sa mère qui m'a informée du départ de Sasha pour la Californie. J'ai tout de suite pensé que ce serait le début du Fashion Magazine, que j'ouvrirai ma série avec Sasha dans les bois -ce qui m'amènerait ensuite à revenir vers Austin. Car Sasha refuse tout, la société de consommation, l'Amerique, sa vie, ses vêtements.

Rick Owens : Quel joli conte romantique. Il y avait un garçon derrière tout cela, n'est-ce-pas ?

Lise Sarfati : En effet, elle était amoureuse et depuis son corps a changé, elle est devenue très fine, très longue, presque androgyne. J'avais l'envie de photographier d'autres membres de sa communauté (dont certains vivent ainsi, ai-je appris, cachés dans la forêt parce qu'ils sont recherchés, je ne sais pas vraiment par qui, la police j'imagine) mais lorsque je suis arrivée là-bas, mon intérêt s'est porté sur Sasha, uniquement. Et voilà Jennifer, une autre fille que j'ai photographiée devant la maison où elle vit la plupart du temps, à Austin. Quant à vous, Rick, de quelle ville venez-vous ?

Rick Owens : De Porterville, entre Los Angeles et San Francisco, à l'intérieur des terres. Une ville qui ressemblait beaucoup à ce que vous avez photographié d'Austin. La maison de mes parents était quasiment comme celle de Jennifer, pas en briques mais en stuc, avec les mêmes détails ; du blanc, du vert, des huisseries et une porte vitrée. Notre maison datait des années 40, on y avait une belle hauteur sous plafond puisque c'était un ancien presbytère. Les similitudes ne s'arrêtent pas là : je suis allé dans une école à laquelle une de ces maisons me fait penser, et ma mère avait la même allure que ces mères-là... Comment vous avez trouvé toutes ces filles ?

Lise Sarfati : Dans leurs écoles. Ou par connaissances ; ainsi Rosemary était une amie de Sasha, qui m'a également présenté trois ou quatre de ses copines. Celle-ci, Eva Claire, je l'ai rencontrée il y a deux ans à Austin alors que je travaillais sur la série « The New Life ». Quant à Jennifer, elle est la petite amie d'un vieil ami.

Rick Owens : Et vous, où avez-vous grandi ?

Lise Sarfati : A Nice, dans le sud de la France, près de la frontière italienne. Une ville où l'on croisait essentiellement des personnes âgées et des adolescents. Ceux-ci étaient assez sauvages, ils aimaient faire le coup de poing avec les fascistes italiens, et leurs affrontements se déroulaient au coeur de la ville qui était une sorte d'entre-deux, si près de la frontière et construite par des architectes italiens. Beaucoup d'artistes vivaient aussi à Nice, comme Ben qui a créé le mouvement Fluxus, ainsi que de nombreux russes arrivés là après la révolution de 1917. De drôles de mélanges.

Rick Owens : En regard, quand vous allez à Austin, avez-vous une sensation d'exotisme ?

Lise Sarfati : Non. J'aime bien me rendre dans les villes de province où les gens s'ennuient. Au début, c'était difficile de construire une histoire autour de cela : un être humain, le corps, l'environnement, la maison.

Rick Owens : Vous auriez très bien pu faire cela à Nice. Pourquoi avoir été jusqu'au Texas ?

Lise Sarfati : J'ai vécu dix ans en Russie avant de partir aux Etats-Unis en 2003. Je ne voulais pas rester à Nice, c'eut été absurde. Quoique ; peu importe où je me trouve puisque je ne suis que là où j'ai envie d'être. Tout est question de désir.

Rick Owens : Vous semblez attirée par le Midwest américain. Qu'est-ce qui vous a plu aux Etats-Unis ?

Lise Sarfati : L'espace. Une question primordiale, pour moi, que la sensation de mon corps dans l'espace. C'est une histoire simple, tout paraît plus réel, plus authentique, et vous arrivez à vous projeter plus facilement.

Rick Owens : J'essaie de me représenter ce qui peut être intéressant pour quelqu'un comme vous, qui vient de Nice, et…

Lise Sarfati : Mais je ne suis pas arrivée à Austin comme ça, en provenance de Nice !

Rick Owens : Oui, enfin, d'Europe. Je cherchais à établir un lien en tant qu'Américain: d'où pouvait venir votre intérêt pour une ville comme Austin, qui n'a pour moi rien de fascinant, qu'est-ce qui pouvait vous y attirer, vous l'Européenne ?

Lise Sarfati : Beaucoup de choses me fascinent ; la simplicité des éléments, la beauté des maisons. J'adore les constructions en bois de la « middle class ». Lors de mon avant-dernier voyage là-bas, pour photographier des publicités, j'ai eu beaucoup de contacts avec des gens riches, qui habitaient des demeures de riches. C'était si ennuyeux. Mais la maison de Jennifer, qui ressemble un peu à celle de votre enfance, je l'aime bien. Elle a une histoire, un vrai style. Les maisons des gens aisés n'ont pas de profondeur, trop neuves elles suscitent de l'effroi, quasiment. Tout y est fonctionnel, il n'y a pas d'esthétique. Et vous, avez-vous ressenti cela ? S'exiler à Paris pour radicalement changer d'univers ?

Rick Owens : Parfois les gens me demandent si Los Angeles me manque. Je n'y pense jamais. Je sais que j'y retournerai un jour même si je n'y ai pas mis les pieds depuis six ans -il y a tellement d'autres endroits où aller. Et puis je fais ce que je fais n'importe où. Pourquoi Paris ? Ce n'est même pas la question d'aimer cette ville, c'était simplement plus pratique pour moi. Je ne suis pas très sentimental, je pense que je pourrais vivre n'importe où -pourvu que je puisse y acheter à manger.

Lise Sarfati : Ne serait-pas une posture ? C'est tellement élégant pour un Américain de vivre à Paris.

Rick Owens : Je ne sais pas ; ce que je sais, c'est aimer la légère perversité de la situation: quelqu'un comme moi vivant au coeur du 7ème arrondissement ! C'est drôle, ça me réjouit. D'autre part, comme je ne parle pas français, je me sens très à l'aise dans ma condition d'étranger. Cette très belle ville est aussi, à mes yeux, terriblement exotique.

Lise Sarfati : Ce décalage vous donne-t-il de la force pour votre créativité, une énergie inédite ?

Rick Owens : Je crois que cela m'amène à expérimenter l'artifice -moi qui ai toujours été un grand admirateur de cette forme de raffinement européen- plus encore que je ne l'ai fait dans le passé.

Lise Sarfati : Par « artifice », vous entendez une plus grande sophistication ?

Rick Owens : Notamment. Prenons l'exemple de la pâtisserie. A Austin, Texas, ils n'ont que des doughnuts. A Paris, en bas de chez moi, ils mettent en vitrine des sucreries incroyables -une couche de ci, une couche de ça, et une autre petite couche encore. Plus encore que de sophistication, il s'agit de quelque chose de sur-développé, d'exagéré, d'extrême. De décadent en un sens, parce qu'absolument pas nécessaire. Cela a dû m'influencer dans mes créations.

Lise Sarfati : Pourquoi ce mot, « décadent » ?

Rick Owens : Parce que la culture française a besoin de survivre, sans en avoir le temps. Et comme la plupart des gens courrent sans cesse, ils se concentrent sur ces gâteaux, posant là une couche de crème, là une autre de chantilly. Lorsqu'une culture a eu le temps, l'argent et la paix nécessaires, elle a inventé des choses élaborées.

Lise Sarfati : Mais nous, Français, ressentons que la France perd de sa personnalité sous l'influence de l'économie américaine et de son idéologie. Quand j'étais adolescente, on m'emmenait dans un magasin où un artisan fabriquait des chaussures lui-même, dans son arrière-boutique. Elles étaient l'assemblage de toutes sortes de matériaux, on les aurait crues sortie d'un film de Fellini. Des bottes souples avec des lacets d'un rouge foncé. Aujourd'hui c'est fini, on ne trouve plus ce type d'objets.

Rick Owens : Vous savez pourquoi ? Parce que les Européens en ont assez du grand artifice. Et les gens comme vous se sont tournés vers l'Amérique pour y rechercher l'authenticité, les choses faites de manière plus humble, plus honnête.

Lise Sarfati : C'est vrai que j'aime la simplicité de l'environnement, les petites villes de province avec leurs rues centrales bordées de maisons en bois. Mais vous qui parlez si bien de simplicité, regardez-vous les gens de près?

Rick Owens : Pas vraiment. Je ne pense pas être capable de discernement à propos des gens ; jamais je ne les regarde de près.

Lise Sarfati : Pas dans les yeux ? Vous n'en avez pas besoin ?

Rick Owens : En quelque sorte. C'est drôle que vous disiez cela parce qu'on m'a déjà lancé : "Toi, tu n'as besoin de personne !" Il y a du vrai ; je suis très intériorisé, très égoïste, vivant dans mon petit monde à moi. Michelle, avec qui je vis en pointillé, me dit souvent que je ne donne pas beaucoup. Comme j'évolue dans un univers qui pratique beaucoup l'auto-indulgence, je me dis parfois : «Mais que m'arrivera-t-il quand j'aurai 70 ans ? Vais-je devenir un monstre ? » Mais je dois rester concentré sur moi-même pour rester créatif. Mon travail n'est pas focalisé sur la « décoration », plutôt sur le volume, les formes et les textures. Et plus important encore, les fibres elles-mêmes, les fils du tissu, ce qui me permet d'aller plus loin dans design.

Lise Sarfati : Tel un designer existentialiste ?

Rick Owens : Est-ce existentialiste ?

Lise Sarfati : Oui, le fait d'aller à l'intérieur des choses.

Rick Owens : Ça sonne bien. Vous avez raison. A l'intérieur… autant que possible.

Lise Sarfati : J'ai posé la même genre de question à Azzedine Alaïa ; quelle est votre idée de la création ?

Rick Owens : Pour monsieur Alaïa, qui est quelqu'un que je respecte profondément, tout est organisé autour de la construction. Ma sensibilité n'en est pas très éloignée ; j'aime l'assemblage, le fait de travailler sur un corps et de fabriquer des vêtements tri-dimensionnels. Je n'ai pas suivi une école de mode mais une école de patronage : une formation technique que j'avais entreprise pour trouver un job, et où l'on apprend à réaliser des patrons. Pendant six ans, à Los Angeles, j'ai pratiqué ce métier dans différentes boîtes. Ce fut mon entraînement : comment faire des vêtements. Je ne sais pas s'ils sont si nombreux, les couturiers qui peuvent créer quelque chose, eux-mêmes, à partir d'une pièce de tissu…

Lise Sarfati : Outre Los Angeles, quelles sont vos villes de « province » préférées, aux Etats-Unis ?

Rick Owens : Je n'ai pas d'attirance particulière pour les petites villes américaines. J'ai grandi à Porterville, Californie, parmi une multitude d'autres petites villes dont une perchée en haut des montagnes. Les élèves qui y habitaient descendaient en bus, ce qui prenait deux heures en hiver à cause de la neige, et certains jours ils restaient bloqués dans les nuages, c'était si glamour. Ils étaient tous athlétiques, grands et beaux, toujours bronzés parce qu'ils faisaient du ski, semblant porter en eux quelque chose de spécial, un exotisme, comme s'ils appartenaient à une autre espèce… La montagne était un endroit merveilleux où aller, parce que les enfants, là-bas, étaient très libres. Et Sasha, la fille qui vit dans les bois de Californie, me fait penser à eux.

Lise Sarfati : Je suis allée dans pas mal de grandes villes ; Portland dans l'Oregon, la Nouvelle Orléans, Los Angeles, San Francisco. Et j'ai constaté qu'il est plus facile dans les petites villes qui représentent, à mes yeux, une sorte "de deuxième Amérique", d'y approcher les gens. Notamment les adolescents. Ce n'est pas le côté social de l'adolescent américain qui m'intéresse, plutôt l'adolescence d'un point de vue générique, comme une métaphore, une transition, un miroir. C'est une période où l'on se sent fragile, pas vraiment intégré aux choses alentour - quelque part ailleurs, ce qui veut dire : jamais là où vous devriez être.

Rick Owens : J'aime beaucoup l'idée de l'adolescence, qui porte aussi en elle quelque chose de très triste. Parce que ces gamins remplis de peurs, d'idéalisme, et qui se sentent si déterminés, inévitablement devront composer avec le monde, plus tard, comme nous l'avons tous fait. C'est ainsi que je vois l'adolescence -douceur, tristesse, énergie, sexualité. Et bien que je n'ai pas de patience avec eux, je me sens encore un adolescent, d'une certaine manière, car j'ai tant aimé cette époque de ma vie, peut-être trop, qu'il faut que j'arrive à m'en détacher. Un jour.

What could they talk about, Rick Owens, a Californian who's lived in France for years, and Lise Sarfati, a French woman who travels around the U.S.? About fabrics, shapes and the teenage experience, about pastry and eccentricity. At Owens' Paris workshop, on the terrace until the rain chased them indoors, Lise and Rick sketched out together the moving contours of a first meeting.

Lise Sarfati: My big idea for this Fashion Magazine was to play off the interior and exterior, the home of each of the girls photographed and its environment. From the bed to the yard, so to speak. The series at the beginning of the book starts with this girl Sasha who left her Texas hometown to live in a California forest with the Rainbow Family.

Rick Owens: The Rainbow Family ? Are they multiracial ?

Lise Sarfati: No. It's just a collective of people who've decided to live free from the chains of money, off the grid, like nomads or outlaws. I thought they'd be hippies, but once I got there I noticed that they had all these dogs, that they deliberately lived like barbarians in some ways. They never washed and all they did all day was smoke dope. That was their way of life, like a tribal community.

Rick Owens: How did you convince them to let you take their picture ?

Lise Sarfati: I'd met Sasha two years before in Austin, Texas, when she was living in a very lovely house. A few months ago, before going back to Austin, I called her mother, who told me that Sasha had left for California. Immediately I had an idea for how this Fashion Magazine would start. I'd begin the series with Sasha in the woods - and that, in turn, would take me back to Austin. See, Sasha rejects everything – consumer society, America, its way of life and its clothes.

Rick Owens: What a nice romantic story. This was about a boy, wasn't it ?

Lise Sarfati: Yeah. She was in love, and after that her body changed. She became very thin, very tall, almost androgynous. I wanted to photograph other commune members (some of them, I found out, were hiding out in the woods because they were wanted - I don't really know by who, the police I imagine). But when I got there, Sasha was all I was interested in. And here's Jennifer, another girl I photographed in front of the house she lives in most of the time, in Austin. What about you, Rick - where are you from ?

Rick Owens: From Porterville, inland between Los Angeles and San Francisco. A town that looked a lot like what you photographed in Austin. My parents' house was almost like Jennifer's, except that it was stucco and not brick. The details were the same: white and green, with window frames and a glass door. Our house was built in the 1940s; it had high ceilings because it was once a presbytery. The similarities go even further: I went to a school that one of these photos reminds me of, and my mother looked like the mothers in your book… How did you find all these girls ?

Lise Sarfati: At their schools. Or through acquaintances. For instance, Rosemary was a friend of Sasha's, who also introduced me to three or four of her other buddies. This is Eva Claire. I met her two years ago when I was working on The New Life series in Austin. As for Jennifer, she's the girlfriend of an old friend.

Rick Owens: And you, where did you grow up ?

Lise Sarfati: In Nice, in the south of France, near the border with Italy. A city where most people you meet are either elderly or teenagers. The kids were pretty wild. They loved getting into fights with the Italian fascists, and these confrontations took place downtown, which was like a no-man's land, very close to the border and designed by Italian architects. A lot of artists lived in Nice too, like Ben, who started the Fluxus movement, and many Russians who came there after the 1917 revolution. Some funny mixes.

Rick Owens: By comparison, when you go to Austin, do you find it exotic ?

Lise Sarfati: No. I like going to small towns where the people get bored. At first it was hard to unfold a story around that, using a human being, a body, an environment, a house.

Rick Owens: It would have been easy to do the same thing in Nice. Why did you go all the way to Texas ?

Lise Sarfati: I lived in Russia for ten years before going to the States in 2003. I didn't want to stay in Nice ; that would have been absurd. Although it doesn't matter where I am since I'm always where I want to be. It's all a question of what you want.

Rick Owens: You seem to be attracted to the American Midwest. What do you like about the U.S. ?

Lise Sarfati: The space. For me, the feeling of my body in space is really important. It's all very simple there. Everything seems more real, more authentic, and you can project yourself more easily.

Rick Owens: I'm trying to get an idea of what would be interesting to someone like you, who comes from Nice…

Lise Sarfati: But I didn't go straight to Austin from Nice !

Rick Owens: Okay, someone from Europe. I was trying to figure out what, as an American, I have in common with you, why you would be interested in a city like Austin that doesn't fascinate me at all. As a European, what attracts you about it ?

Lise Sarfati: A lot of things fascinate me: the simplicity of the elements involved, the beauty of the houses. I love the wooden homes of the middle class. Two trips ago, while I was there shooting ads, I had a lot of contact with rich people, who lived in rich people's homes. It was really boring. But I really like Jennifer's house, which looks a little like where you grew up. It has a history and a real style. The homes of the well off have no depth; they're too new, so new it's almost frightening. Everything about them is functional; there's no aesthetic touch. What about you, did you feel the same thing? Did you go into voluntary exile in Paris to change your world ?

Rick Owens: Sometimes people ask me if I miss LA. I never think about it. I know I'll go back one day, even if I haven't set foot there for six years. There are so many other places to go. Anyway, what I do I can do anywhere. Why Paris? It's not even because I love this town, it's just more practical for me. I'm not very sentimental. I think I could live anywhere, as long as I can buy something to eat.

Lise Sarfati: Isn't that a pose? For an American, it's so elegant to live in Paris.

Rick Owens: I don't know. What I do know is that my situation is slightly perverse and I love it – someone like me living in the heart of the seventh arrondissement! It's funny; that makes me happy. But on the other hand, since I don't speak French, I'm very comfortable with being a foreigner. Paris is a very beautiful, and, to my eyes, terribly exotic city.

Lise Sarfati: Does that disjunct energize your work in a new way ?

Rick Owens: I think it leads me to be more open to artifice than in the past, even though I've always been a great admirer of that form of European refinement.

Lise Sarfati: By “artifice,” do you mean more sophisticated ?

Rick Owens: That in particular. Take the example of pastry. In Austin, all they have is doughnuts. In Paris, downstairs from where I live, there's a whole window-full of incredible sweets - a layer of this, a layer of that and then another layer on top of that. It's more than sophistication. It's overdeveloped, exaggerated and extreme. Decadent, in a sense, because it's absolutely unnecessary. That must have had some influence on my design work.

Lise Sarfati: Why the word “decadent” ?

Rick Owens: Because French culture has to survive, but it doesn't have time. And since most people are running around all the time, they focus on these little cakes, putting on a layer of cream in one place and a layer of whipped cream in another. When a culture has had the time, the money and the peace required, it has invented elaborate things.

Lise Sarfati: But we French people feel that France is losing its personality under the influence of the American economy and its ideology. When I was a teenager, I used to get taken to a store where a shoemaker made the shoes himself, right in the back. They were made of all kinds of different materials put together, like something out of a Fellini movie. Soft leather boots with dark red laces. Today all that's gone: you can't find things like that anymore.

Rick Owens: Do you know why ? Because the Europeans were sick of all that artifice. And people like you turned to America in a quest for authenticity, for things made in a more humble and honest fashion.

Lise Sarfati: It's true that I love the simplicity of the surroundings, the small towns with their main streets lined with wooden houses. But as someone who speaks so well of simplicity, how closely do you look at people?

Rick Owens: Not very. I don't think I'm very discerning when it comes to people; I never look at them closely.

Lise Sarfati: You don't look them in the eye? You don't need to do that ?

Rick Owens: In a way. It's funny that you should say that, since people have thrown that in my face before : “You don't need anyone !” There's something true about that: I'm very inner-directed, very selfish, living in my own little world. Michelle, the woman I live with on and off, often tells me that I'm not very giving. Since I grew up in pretty self-indulgent environment, sometimes I say to myself, “What will happen to me when I'm seventy years old? Will I become a monster ?” But I have to stay concentrated on myself to remain creative. My work isn't focused on the decorative. It's about volumes, shapes and textures. And even more important, the fibers themselves, the weave of the cloth, which allows me to go further in my designs.

Lise Sarfati: Are you an existentialist designer ?

Rick Owens: Is that existentialist ?

Lise Sarfati: Yes, the idea of going deeply inside things.

Rick Owens: That sounds good. You're right… Inside, as much as possible.

Lise Sarfati: I asked Azzedine Alaïa the same kind of question: what's your idea of clothing design?

Rick Owens: For Monsieur Alaïa, who's someone I deeply respect, everything is organized around the construction. My sensibility isn't very different: I love putting things together, working on a body and making three-dimensional clothing. I never went to fashion school - I studied pattern-cutting instead. I went to technical school so I could get a job, and I learned to make patterns. I did that for six years in various Los Angeles shops. That was my training in how to make clothes. I don't know if many other couturiers know how to make something out of a piece of cloth all by themselves.

Lise Sarfati: Besides LA, what are your favorite American “second-tier” cities ?

Rick Owens: I'm not particularly attracted to small cities in the U.S. I grew up in Porterville, California, one among a multitude of towns, including one perched high up in the mountains. The students who lived up there came down in a bus. It took two hours in winter, because of the snow, and some days they were stuck up there in the clouds. It was very glamorous. They were all athletic, tall and good-looking, always tan from skiing. There seemed to be something special and exotic about them. As if they belonged to a different species. The mountains were a marvelous place to go, because the kids there were very free. And Sasha, the young woman who lives in the California woods, makes me think of them.

Lise Sarfati: I've been to quite a few big cities: Portland, Oregon ; New Orleans ; Los Angeles ; San Francisco. And I've noticed that in the smaller cities, towns that to me seem to be a sort of “second America,” it's much easier to talk to people. Especially teenagers. What interests me about American teenagers isn't the social dimension. It's adolescence from a more general point of view, as a metaphor, a transition, a mirror. It's a time when you feel unstable, not really a part of the world around you. You feel like you're somewhere else, never where you should be.

Rick Owens: I really like the idea of adolescence. There's also something sad about it. Because these kids who are so full of fears and idealism, and who feel so determined, will inevitably have to come to terms with the world, sooner or later, as we all have done. That's how I see the teenage years, as sweet, sad, energized and sexual. Even though I have no patience with teenagers, I still feel like one myself, in a way, because I really loved that time in my life, maybe too much, and I have to be able to get over it. Some day.

Il est vingt heures, ce lundi de septembre. Dans une cuisine où sont généreusement servis vins et vodka, la galeriste Carla Sozzani fait se recontrer Azzedine Alaïa et Lise Sarfati puisque Carla, que le créateur présente comme sa « soeur » expose aussi, en cet automne, Lise dans sa galerie milanaise. Autour de la table, alors que passeront plus tard des neveux d'Azzedine -car nous sommes chez lui- la conversation s'engage instantanément. Du Texas à la Russie, de Tunis à Paris, de la mode à la photographie, de l'enfance aux femmes -que l'un habille, que l'autre expose souvent et que Lise aime à photographier- les convives s'animent. Puis Azzedine se met aux fourneaux : côte de boeuf pour tout le monde, fraises en dessert. Le rouge est mis, et la parole vive, toujours libre.

Lise Sarfati : Cette édition du Fashion Magazine a été réalisée à Austin, une petite ville au milieu des Etats-Unis qui est pourtant la capitale du Texas. L'idée était celle d'un travelling dans la cité, y faire des photographies, dans leurs maisons, de filles qui ne sont pas des mannequins. Car je ne suis pas photographe de mode. Le Texas est un état plutôt rock'n'roll. J'aime le rapport que les gens de là-bas ont au vêtement, toujours très précis, très sophistiqué. Ils se rendent tous dans un endroit qui s'appelle Buffalo Exchange ; on y vend les habits qu'on ne met plus, on en rachète d'autres, on mixe plusieurs périodes, c'est vraiment drôle. Etes-vous déjà allé au Texas, Azzedine ?

Azzedine Alaïa : Je connais des femmes originaires du Texas qui dépensent des fortunes à New York, chez Barney's et chez Bergdorf Goodman. Notamment une qui achète tout : elle vient dans son avion privé pour la journée, pénètre dans le magasin avec son coiffeur et sa manucure, s'installe dans un salon où des filles lui présentent des portants de fourrures ou de lingerie -tout ce qui est nouveau. Elle reprend son avion le soir-même, après qu'on lui ait livré les paquets dans son jet. Deux manteaux en zibeline de Fendi, des visons, des pièces parmi les plus chères. L'une des vendeuses, qui était Française, m'a appelé pour me dire « elle achète tes vêtements ». Cette Texane était d'une sophistication insensée. Et très américaine, c'est-à-dire : mince mince mince. Les Américains sont fantastiques par rapport à la mode, ils n'ont pas les mêmes complexes que nous, enfermés par notre culture dans un certain système. Quand tu vois les rédactrices de mode là-bas, elles foncent! Les Européennes, elles, réfléchissent à deux fois avant que ça ne se déclenche.

Lise Sarfati : J'avais peur de ne rien avoir à vous dire. Que l'on parle de choses banales, que l'on se sente bien peut-être, mais quoi d'autre ? Puis j'ai réalisé qu'entre nous, le lien consistait en une différence. Vous êtes un artiste complet, vous créez tout, la matière et la forme ; tandis que moi, je mets juste des miroirs au bon endroit pour refléter une image.

Azzedine Alaïa : Vous ne travaillez pas comme un sculpteur mais comme un peintre.

Carla Sozzani : Il n'y a qu'Azzedine qui change la mentalité des femmes ; c'est très gonflé de le dire mais c'est la vérité.

Azzedine Alaïa : Je ne suis pas dans la mode, je suis là pour les femmes. C'est une obsession pour moi qu'elles soient belles. Cette année, je me suis dit qu'il fallait que je visite mes tantes en Tunisie, j'ai une maison où je n'ai pas passé un quart d'heure en dix ans. J'ai fait mes valises, bien décidé à partir cinq jours, et le billet était pris. Mais il y avait cette commande, une robe où quelque chose n'allait pas. Ça me chiffonnait ; une question d'honnêteté, je ne voulais pas qu'une telle robe sorte de mon atelier même si la cliente la payait le triple. J'ai tout refait, et vécu cette nuit de retouche avec un tel plaisir! Je n'étais même pas fatigué, presque étonné, le lendemain matin, de ne pas avoir dormi, tandis que les gens arrivaient pour nettoyer l'atelier. Comme il fallait la livrer, cette robe, une des filles s'est même levée à cinq heures du matin pour préparer le paquet. Et je me suis dit : quel circuit pour un vêtement, quel dérangement de tout un monde pour le plaisir de la mode et d'une femme !

Lise Sarfati: Qu'est ce qui vous motivait ? Un désir ?

Azzedine Alaïa : Plutôt le respect d'une personne qui met un tel prix dans un vêtement. Toutes les femmes qui entrent dans ma boutique, qu'elles aient de l'argent ou pas, qu'elles soient clochardes ou pas, je les respecte parce qu'elles franchissent la porte et qu'elles viennent vers moi avec admiration. En revanche, quand on me demande des habits pour les Oscars ou des événements de ce genre je dis non, je ne donne pas, je ne prête rien parce que je sais que ces gens-là sont gâtés, et que les autres maisons envoient, envoient.

Lise Sarfati : Et cette idée de minimalisme, cette recherche de la matière et de la ligne pure avec, en même temps, les couleurs de l'attraction, le gris moyen, le rose entre deux : c'est une référence, ça appartient à votre univers ?

Azzedine Alaïa : J'ai toujours pensé qu'une robe passée sur une femme l'encadre, la met en valeur. La robe ne doit pas éclipser la femme, elle la révèle à sa propre beauté. La femme surgit, tu oublies la robe. Je ne veux pas être « dans le coup » ; mon ambition se porte sur la continuité du travail. Les femmes viennent vers moi parce qu'elles veulent être belles, même si leur quotidien se résume aux jeans et aux baskets. Egalement pour plaire à leur fiancé !

Carla Sozzani : Quand tu te sens bien et que tu es jolie, ce n'est pas seulement destiné aux hommes. Aux femmes aussi.

Azzedine Alaïa : A soi-même ! Avec les femmes, tu apprends ton métier. A cet égard, les mariages sont les moments parmi les plus intenses, qui cristallisent des rêves d'enfance. Parfois les parents accompagnent leur jeune fille qui s'en fiche ; elle est en jean, elle ne veut rien. Il faut beaucoup de patience pour qu'elle finisse par s'ouvrir. Et parfois, peu à peu la coquinerie surgit, les « je voudrais ça comme ça » et moi qui répond « mais vous m'aviez dit pas de décolletés ». A l'issue d'un essayage, une de ces jeunes filles ressemblait à une danseuse de cabaret ; le pompon ! De manière plus générale, j'ai remarqué l'apparition d'une nouvelle génération de clientes. Ça m'intéresse de voir ce nouveau monde: des jeunes qui sont devenus très riches et qui n'ont pas le temps, ça te change la mentalité du travail. Les riches d'avant, avec leurs fortunes héritées, c'était différent: même dans une famille très aisée, on ne laissait pas les filles de quinze ou dix-huit ans aller se balader pour dénicher un milliardaire, ou acheter des robes. Heureusement.

Carla Sozzani : Mon père était furieux quand, à quinze ans, je dépensais des fortunes dans des robes !

Azzedine Alaïa : Carla s'est intéressée à la photographie il y a longtemps, et pas uniquement à la photo de mode. Elle a une collection fantastique. Elle a un oeil pour les images comme pour le design - j'ai notamment connu le travail de Marc Newson chez Carla. Son regard m'a fait changer, j'ai balancé tout ce que j'avais avant.

Carla Sozzani : J'ai exposé beaucoup de femmes, comme Francesca Woodman.

Azzedine Alaïa : Pour moi, peu importe qu'il s'agisse de femmes ou d'hommes. J'ai habillé trois hommes ces derniers temps parce que c'était des gens importants. Une femme c'est plus facile: comme une cantatrice, une grande actrice, elle a toutes les qualités. Même quand elles sont folles il y a quelque chose – qui peut friser le ridicule ou être fantastique.

Lise Sarfati : Je ne fais pas de différence entre un homme et une femme. Tout le monde me dit « oh tu photographies des filles » quand d'après moi ça ne change rien. Mais tu ne peux pas passer de l'un à l'autre, tu choisis l'un ou l'autre. Lors de mon séjour en Russie c'était plutôt les garçons -en rapport probablement avec la destruction de l'univers, avec le mental russe. J'avais par exemple rencontré cet homme qui travaillait dans une banque : à ma question mais « pourquoi l'argent tout de suite, les beaux vêtements tout de suite ? » il m'a répondu « parce que demain qui sait si je serai vivant ».

Azzedine Alaïa : C'est un état d'esprit que je partage. Au jour le jour et hop ! Je ne garde rien, je claque dans l'instant. Mes grands-parents n'ont jamais rien accumulé, ni pensé à l'héritage qu'ils laisseraient ; mon père ne m'a pas donné d'argent et je n'en ai guère réclamé, ce qui était normal puisque je vivais chez lui. Cette éducation m'a façonné, je me suis débrouillé toute ma vie sans penser à plus tard. Je n'aime pas la propriété ; j'ai été rue du Parc Royal, puis rue de Bellechasse. A cette époque, j'aurais pu devenir le plus riche des stylistes. Tous les contrats qu'on m'a proposés ! Quand je quitte un lieu je n'ai pas la nostalgie du départ et quand j'arrive quelque part, j'en profite. Je ne suis qu'un occupant, avant moi il y eut tellement de passage sur ce sol.

Lise Sarfati : Et vous Carla ?

Carla Sozzani : Je suis de passage !

Azzedine Alaïa : Non, Carla ne s'arrête jamais. Je n'ai jamais vu quelqu'un avec une telle énergie. Je l'admire! Je l'ai rencontrée la première fois pour l'un de mes défilés rue de Bellechasse ; parmi les gens de “Vogue”, Carla fut la première à s'intéresser à moi, à faire réaliser des photos. Elle s'occupait de tout avec une telle facilité ; rapide mais bien pensé. C'est rare les femmes de cette trempe, qui pourtant dégagent une fragilité pareille ; regarde ses poignets et pourtant elle peut te déménager cette table à la seconde, elle peut tuer un régiment. On s'est occupés ensemble d'une de mes expositions en Hollande, à Groningen. Le musée entier, vingt-deux salles. On attendait la sculpture de Picasso et une momie. Je voulais des choses qui correspondent à l'art contemporain et à l'art africain avec Basquiat. Je voulais du Schnabel. C'était fantastique. Les gens ont joué le jeu, je ne connais pas d'autres pays ou ils l'auraient fait. La France, tu meurs pour qu'ils te sortent une momie !

Carla Sozzani : Azzedine repassait encore les robes à six heures du matin.

Azzedine Alaïa : J'ai si peu dormi, toutes ces nuits où deux à quatre heures de sommeil me suffisaient, que j'ai déjà vécu trois cents ans, au moins ! Et Carla est du même bois ; à Groningen, elle leur a demandé de repeindre les murs, de noter tout, de s'occuper de la poussière sur la momie ! Quand tout le monde a voulu aller se coucher elle a dit «ah non pas question, on termine !».

Carla Sozzani : Mais c'est normal, il fallait finir jusqu'au bout la beauté.

Azzedine Alaïa : On a eu des toiles de Julian Schnabel parce que c'est un ami, quasiment la famille. C'est drôle il voulait parler français avec moi qui ne parle pas l'anglais -c'est dramatique je ne fais aucun effort. Avec Julian j'avais honte, il parlait en anglais et je répondais en français. Heureusement sa femme Jacqueline parle notre langue, on a toujours réussi à communiquer. J'aime les gens vifs, comme les Schnabel ou Bruce Weber. Le matin, souvent je me dis: « Qui vais-je rencontrer aujourd'hui, que vais-je apprendre » ? J'ai envie de beaucoup de choses. Mais je vis le jour-même.

Lise Sarfati : Et la photographie ?

Azzedine Alaïa : Bien sur que je m'y intéresse. Ma première collection, je l'ai commencée à l'âge de dix ans ! Des photomatons. Mon grand-père, qui était agent de police, travaillait au service des cartes d'identités et le vendredi, quand je n'avais pas classe, il s'occupait de moi. On allait au cinéma, une salle où passaient les films égyptiens avec Oum Kalsoum, les Ben Hur, et Silvana Mangano dans "Riz Amer ": j'en mourais ! Sinon je l'accompagnais à son travail, à coté de madame Angel au bureau des cartes d'identité. Elle avait un panier en fer, comme pour la salade, et triait les trois photos très épaisses -il fallait enlever une couche avec le cutter- que les gens devaient lui fournir. La première elle la tamponnait et la photo sortait en gaufrette, j'avais l'impression que c'était comme des beignets, j'étais fasciné, la deuxième elle l'accrochait sur le dossier et la troisième était là au cas où la première aurait été déchirée, sinon au panier ! Et je récupérais tout ce qu'il y avait dans le panier! J'avais, au bout d'un certain temps, presque tout les gens de Tunis… Je les triais dans des boîtes à chaussures: les blondes, les brunes, les noirs, les moustachus, les barbus, cheveux longs, cheveux courts, frisés, raides, et quand elles étaient blondes, alors là ! Mes préférées étaient les Siciliennes en robes de communiantes, avec des boucles anglaises.

Lise Sarfati : Vous aimez les uniformes.

Azzedine Alaïa : Non mais je trouvais par exemple les soeurs de Sion très sexy quand elle marchaient avec le balancement de la croix, et leurs sandales où tu pouvais voir le pied bronzé jusqu'à la cheville, comme une chaussette.

Carla Sozzani : J'ai étudié chez les soeurs avec l'uniforme obligatoire jusqu'à l'âge de dix-huit ans et demi, la robe bleue le tablier blanc et les bas chair très épais. C'est aussi pour ça, Lise, que j'ai aimé ta série Immaculate.

Azzedine Alaïa : Que j'ai également adorée.

Lise Sarfati : Le personnage, le corps, le vêtement: trois éléments avec lesquels je pouvais jouer une espèce de théâtre nô. Et vous Azzedine ?

Azzedine Alaïa : Je n'ai jamais, depuis mes quatorze ans, modifié mon costume. J'en ai trois cents, le même vêtement dont je change tout le temps. Les costumes chinois bleus, je les trouvais à l'époque aux puces de Tunis et je les teignais. De ma vie je n'ai possédé que trois costumes et un manteau. A l'âge de seize ans, pour le bal de l'Ecole des beaux arts, je suis allé chez un tailleur sicilien qui m'a fait une veste et une cravate. Quand je suis venu à Paris, on m'a dit qu'il me fallait un costume de ville et un manteau : il était en poil de chameau à l'italienne, le seul de toute mon existence! Quant à la veste, elle était courte avec deux petites fentes parce que je suis petit.

Lise Sarfati : Ah quelle horreur !

Azzedine Alaïa : Comment quelle horreur, elle était géniale ma veste je te jure, je m'en souviendrai toujours. A l'italienne ! L'épaule un peu tombante, élargie, à double boutonnage. À l'anglaise la coupe est étroite parce qu'ils sont minces, quand les Italiens roulent les mécaniques: en bons Méditerranéens, leur fessier bouge tout seul lorsqu'ils marchent. Le dernier costume je l'ai fait tailler à Paris, il m'a fallu un an pour le payer ! Cauchemar : un tissu en pied de poule ! Aujourd'hui je n'ai ni cravates ni chemises. En tee-shirt et veste noirs, c'est tout.

Lise Sarfati : Moi qui connais peu cet univers, j'ai l'impression en vous rencontrant de comprendre, par contraste, ce qu'est la mode : un emballage avec lequel on ne va pas au fond des choses, une coquille d'or. Vous semblez à l'opposé de cela. D'où vient votre esthétique ?

Azzedine Alaïa : D'un mélange de culture ; en Tunisie c'était une telle mixité. J'ai eu une enfance fantastique, pauvre et riche et même temps. Depuis je passe des nuits à coudre, je ne suis pas malheureux. Tout dépend de l'éducation, la mienne m'a ouvert à la liberté. Ma grand-mère était la plus libérée de toutes les femmes, plus encore qu'en Europe. On a jamais vu de clef sur sa porte ; tout le monde entrait.

Lise Sarfati : J'ai lu un livre qui s'appelle « la Maison d'Eve au paradis », où il était expliqué que la poutre, dans la première maison qu'aurait construite l'homme, représentait sa position verticale. C'est pour cela que mon travail de photographe, je voulais l'axer sur la maison.

Azzedine Alaïa : Dans n'importe quel ville je me sens bien, je ne me suis jamais senti étranger dans un pays. L'installation à Paris, ce fut pour des questions d'enfance, des séquelles. A Tunis j'ai grandi avec des Français, des juifs, des Italiens, toute la Méditerranée. Personne n'était raciste, j'ai appris ce mot en arrivant à Paris. Mon oncle était un juif de Tunis et madame Pineau, la sage-femme qui m'a mis au monde, était une Française de Trouville, qui habitait le quartier le plus difficile de Tunis; à mon grand-père, l'agent de police, qui lui avait proposé de la protéger, elle a répondu: «C'est moi qui les ai mis au monde ces gamins, que veux-tu qu'ils me fassent ?» Madame Pineau était pour moi comme une deuxième mère, j'allais chez elle, j'assistais aux accouchements, je l'aidais à chauffer l'eau, elle me donnait des bébés qui sortaient du ventre des femmes! J'avais dix ans et déjà au courant de tout. Je vivais une vie sans interdit. Ouverte mais sans ressentir le besoin de parler. Parfois c'est stupide de développer. J'ai un ami qui, à quarante ans, voulait dire à ses parents qu'il était homosexuel ; franchement, tu crois que sa mère et son père ne le savaient pas? Mes parents ne m'ont jamais posé une seule question et pourtant l'éducation de mon père était dure.Il y avait une énorme pudeur entre nous, ne pas déranger pour ne pas vivre de conflit.

It's eight o'clock in the evening on a September Monday. In a kitchen where wine and vodka are served generously, the gallery owner Carla Sozzani introduces Azzedine Alaïa and Lise Sarfati to each other. Carla, whom the designer calls his “sister,” is showing Lise's work this fall at her Milan gallery. We're sitting around in Azzedine's kitchen - his nephews are to drop by later - and the conversation moves right into gear. The increasingly lively table talk is about Texas and Russia, Tunis and Paris, fashion and photography, children and women. Azzedine dresses women, Carla often exhibits work by women and Lise likes to photograph them. Then Azzedine starts cooking: Rib of beef for everyone, strawberries for dessert. The red wine and the chatter flow freely.

Lise Sarfati: This issue of Fashion Magazine was done in Austin, Texas. A small town, but still it's the state capital. The idea was to do a kind of tracking shot of the city, to shoot, in their own homes, girls who aren't professional models. That's because I'm not a fashion photographer, and anyway, Texas is more of a rock 'n' roll state. I really like the way people there relate to clothing. It's always very unambiguous, very sophisticated. They all go to a place called the Buffalo Exchange, where you sell the clothes you never wear anymore and buy new ones. People mix clothes from different periods. It's a lot of fun. Have you ever been to Texas, Azzedine ?

Azzedine Alaïa: I know women from Texas who spend a fortune in New York, especially at Barney's and Bergdorf Goodman. There's one in particular who buys everything. She flies in for the day on her private jet, goes to the store with her hairdresser and manicurist and plunks herself down in a room where the girls bring her loads of furs and lingerie - everything that's just come in. She gets back on her plane the same night, as soon as her purchases are delivered to her plane. Two Fendi sable coats, minks, some of the most expensive items. One of the salesgirls, who's French, called me up to tell me, “She buys your clothes.” That Texas lady is incredibly sophisticated. And very American - thinner than thin. Americans are fantastic when it comes to fashion. They don't have the same hang-ups we do - we're boxed into a certain system by our culture. When you see fashion editors there, they just plow right ahead. Their European counterparts have to think about everything twice before they do it.

Lise Sarfati: I was worried that I wouldn't have anything to say to you. That we'd talk small talk and maybe get along well, but then what? Then I realized that what we have in common is a difference. You're a complete artist, you create the materials and what you make with them, whereas what I do is to put mirrors in the right place to reflect an image.

Azzedine Alaïa: What you do is not like a sculptor, but a painter.

Carla Sozzani: What Azzedine does is to change women's mentalities. No one else does that.

Azzedine Alaïa: I'm not into fashion for its own sake. It's for the women. I'm obsessed with making them beautiful. This year, I told myself I had to visit my aunts in Tunisia. I have a house there where I haven't spent fifteen minutes in ten years. I bought the tickets and packed my bags, my mind totally made up to go for five days. But there was this commission, a dress where something just wasn't quite right. It bothered me. It's a question of honesty: I didn't want a dress to leave my atelier under those conditions, even if the customer paid triple. I redid it completely, and let me tell you, the night I spent tailoring was pure pleasure. I wasn't even tired the next morning, just surprised when the cleaning people started to show up for work and I realized I hadn't slept. Since the dress had to be delivered, one of the girls got up at five a.m. to pack it up. I said to myself: what a lot of to-do for an item of apparel, what a lot of bother for so many people just for the pleasure of fashion and to please a woman!

Lise Sarfati: What motivated you ? A desire ?

Azzedine Alaïa: More a respect for the person who pays so much for something to wear. I respect every woman who comes into my shop, whether she has money or not, because she opened the door and because she comes to me with admiration.

Lise Sarfati: What about your minimalism, your focus on materials and pure lines, and at the same time, attractive colors, the not quite gray, the almost pink ? Does that have some special meaning for you, in your world ?

Azzedine Alaïa: I've always felt that when a woman puts on a dress, it's like a picture frame; it shows her at her best. The dress shouldn't overshadow the woman; it should bring out her own beauty. What you see is the woman and you forget the dress. I don't want to be “in the moment.” My ambition has to do with long-term continuity. Women come to me because they want to be beautiful, even if most of the time they wear jeans and sneakers. Also, they want to please their men !

Carla Sozzani: When you feel good and that you're pretty, it's not just to please men. It's also for other women.

Azzedine Alaïa: And to please yourself! You learn your trade from working with women. In that sense, a wedding is one of the most intense moments of your life, when your childhood dreams crystallize. Sometimes parents come with a daughter who doesn't give a damn. There's nothing she wants. It takes a lot of patience before she finally opens up. Sometimes, little by little, she gets into it. She says, “I want that like that,” and I'm, like, “But you said you didn't want a plunging neckline!” By the end of one fitting I did, the girl looked like a nightclub dancer with pompoms! More generally speaking, I've noticed the emergence of a new generation of customers. I find this new crowd interesting - young people who've become very rich and don't have time for anything. That changes how you think about your work. The old rich, who inherited their fortunes, were different. Even the best-off families didn't let their fifteen - or eigh teen - year-old daughters wander off to find themselves a millionaire or buy a dress. Luckily.

Carla Sozzani: My father was furious at me when I was fifteen and spent a fortune buying dresses.

Azzedine Alaïa: Carla has been interested in photography for a long time, and not just fashion photography. She has a fantastic collection. She has an eye for photos just like her eye for design. For instance, I first found out about Marc Newsome through Carla. Her way of seeing things made me change. I threw out all my old stuff.

Carla Sozzani: I've often featured work by women in my gallery. Francesca Woodman, for instance.

Azzedine Alaïa: Women or men, it doesn't make much difference to me. I dressed three men lately because they were important people. Women are easier. An opera singer or a great actress has everything. Even when they're crazy, there's something about them - something that can be either almost ridiculous or fantastic.

Lise Sarfati: Men or women - it doesn't make much difference to me either. Everyone tells me, “Oh, you take pictures of girls,” when for me, it's all the same. But you can't go back and forth between them – you have to choose one or the other. When I was living in Russia, I mainly photographed boys. That probably had something to do with the destruction of the Russians' mental world. For example, I met a man who worked at a bank. When I asked him, “Why do you need money and beautiful clothes right away ?” he answered, “Because who knows if I'll be alive tomorrow.”

Azzedine Alaïa: I feel the same way he did. Live for the day and seize the time! I don't save anything. It's all gone in a minute. My grandparents never accumulated anything; they never thought about leaving an inheritance. My father didn't give me money and I rarely asked for any. That seemed like how it was supposed to be, since I was living in his house. That education made me what I am. I've always made my own way in life without thinking about tomorrow. I don't like property. First I lived and worked on rue du Parc Royal, and later opened up on rue de Bellechasse. In those days I could have become the richest guy in my profession. I was offered so many contracts! When I move away from someplace, there's no nostalgia for the past, and when I go somewhere elsewhere, I want to make the most of it. I'm just an occupant. There were so many people who passed this way before me.

Lise Sarfati: What about you, Carla ?

Carla Sozzani: I'm just passing through !

Azzedine Alaïa: Carla never stops. I've never seen anyone with so much energy. I admire her! I first met her at one of my shows at rue de Bellechasse. She was with the Vogue crowd. Carla was the first to take an interest in me, to arrange photo shoots. She handled everything with ease - fast but well thought-out. There aren't many women who can be like that, and at the same time seem so fragile. Look at her wrists - but she can move a table in a heartbeat. She could kill a regiment. We worked together on an exhibition I did in Groningen, in Holland. The whole museum, twenty-two rooms. There were supposed to be some Picasso sculptures and a mummy. I wanted stuff that went with contemporary art and African art with Basquiat. I wanted some Schnabel. It was fantastic. People really went along with what we wanted. I don't know any other country where they would have done that. In France, they'd never get you a mummy !

Carla Sozzani: At six in the morning Azzedine was still ironing the dresses.

Azzedine Alaïa: I've slept so little in my life - all those nights where I got by on two to four hours sleep -that I've already put in the equivalent of at least three hundred years. Carla is the same way. At Groningen, she asked them to repaint the walls, to keep track of everything, to make sure the mummy got dusted. When everyone else wanted to go to bed, she'd say, “No way - we have to finish!”

Carla Sozzani: But that's how it should be. We had to do whatever it took to make everything beautiful.

Azzedine Alaïa: We had paintings by Julian Schnabel because he's a friend, almost family. It was funny -he wanted to speak French with me, since I don't speak English. It's terrible, I don't even try. With Julian I was embarrassed. He'd speak in English and I'd answer in French. Luckily his wife Jacqueline speaks our language, so we always managed to communicate. I like lively people like the Schanbels and Bruce Webber. I often say to myself in the morning, “Who am I going to meet today, what am I going to learn?” I want so much. But I take it one day at a time.

Lise Sarfati: What about photography ?

Azzedine Alaïa: I'm interested in it, of course. I started on my first collection when I was ten. Photo machine pictures. My grandfather, who was a cop, worked in the identity card service, and on Friday, when there was no school, he took care of me. We went to the movies, a theater where they were playing Egyptian films with Oum Kalsoum, Hollywood epics like Ben Hur and Silvana Mangano in Bitter Rice. I loved it! Otherwise, I'd go to work with him, at the ID cards office where he worked with Madame Angel. She had a steel basket, like for a head of lettuce, and sorted the three photos people had to supply her with. They were very thick, and you had to cut off one layer with a box knife. She'd stamp the first photo and it would come out looking like a wafer. I thought it was like a waffle iron. I was fascinated. She'd attach the second picture to the file folder, and the third one was in case the first one got torn. Otherwise, she'd throw it back in the basket. I took all the pictures that ended up in the basket. After awhile, I had nearly everyone in Tunis. I'd sort the pictures into shoeboxes: blondes, brunettes, black men, moustaches or beards, long or short hair, curly or straight; and when it was a blonde woman, oh boy! My favorites were the Sicilian girls in communion dresses, with ringlets.

Lise Sarfati: You loved uniforms.

Azzedine Alaïa: No, but for instance I found the Sisters of Zion very sexy when they walked with the swaying of the cross, and their sandals, where you could see their feet tanned up to the ankle like a sock.

Carla Sozzani: I went to nuns' school, where you had to wear a uniform, until I was eighteen and a half. A blue dress, white apron and very thick flesh-colored stockings. That's another reason, Lise, that I like your Immaculate series.

Azzedine Alaïa: I loved it too.

Lise Sarfati: Characters, bodies, clothing: three elements with which I could stage a kind of No theater. What about you, Azzedine ?

Azzedine Alaïa: I've worn the same kind of suit since I was fourteen. I have three hundred of them – the same thing that I change all the same. The blue Chinese suits I used to find at the flea market in Tunis and then dye. My whole life I've never had anything but three suits and an overcoat. At the age of sixteen, for the fine arts school prom, I went to a Sicilian tailor who made me a jacket and tie. When I came to Paris, people told me I had to have a town suit and an overcoat. My overcoat was camelhair, Italian-style, the only one I've ever owned. The jacket was short with two small slits because I'm short.

Lise Sarfati: How horrible !

Azzedine Alaïa: What do you mean, horrible? I'm telling you, my jacket was great. I'll always remember it. It was Italian! The shoulders fell a little, broad, with two rows of buttons. Cut very tight, English-style, because Italians are thin. Good Mediterraneans that they are, their backsides move all by themselves when they walk their walk. The last suit I had made for me in Paris took me a year to pay for! What a nightmare - hounds-tooth check! Nowadays I don't own any ties or dress shirts. I wear a black t-shirt and jacket, that's all.

Lise Sarfati: I don't really know that world at all, but on the other hand, listening to you I feel like I understand what fashion is: a wrapping that doesn't get to the bottom of things, a golden shell. You seem to be against all that. Where do you aesthetics come from ?

Azzedine Alaïa: From a whole cultural blend. Tunisia was really very mixed. I had a fantastic childhood, rich and poor at the same time. Now when I spend my nights sewing I don't mind at all. Everything depends on your education. Mine made me appreciate freedom. My grandmother was a totally liberated woman, even freer than women in Europe. There was never a key in her door - everyone came and went.

Lise Sarfati: I read a book called Eve's House in Heaven, where it explained that the beams in the houses built by the first humans represented their upright position. That's why I wanted the home to be the axis of my photographic work.

Azzedine Alaïa: I feel good no matter what city I'm in; I've never felt like a foreigner in any country. I moved to Paris for reasons that have to do with my childhood and its after-effects. In Tunisia I grew up with French people, Jews, Italians, the whole Med. No one was racist - I learned that word when I came to Paris. My uncle was a Tunisian Jew, and Madame Pineau, the midwife who assisted my birth, was a French woman from Trouville. She lived in the toughest neighborhood in Tunis. When my uncle the cop offered to protect her, she replied, “I helped all these kids be born - do you think they'd do anything to me?” Madame Pineau was like a second mother to me. I used to go over to her house, watch women give birth, help her boil water - she'd hand me the babies right out of their mothers' bellies! I was only ten and already I knew it all. There were no taboos in my life. She was open-minded, but didn't feel like she had to talk about it. Sometimes it's stupid to explain too much. I had a friend who, when he was forty, wanted to come out to his parents. Did his mother and father really not know he was gay? My parents never asked me a single question and yet my father's education was a tough one. There was an enormous sense of discretion among us. Everyone wanted to avoid conflict by not offending the others.