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EDITION

2024, Shortlisted

school

Ecole nationale supérieure Louis-Lumière, Paris, France

school

@leilagraindorge

In a society obsessed with body control (especially over women's bodies), the ageing female body is particularly devalued and rarely seen. Women over fifty are underrepresented in photography and almost invariably associated with negative stereotypes. At the same time, the young (female) body is always exposed and unveiled. Although a real person would not be allowed to appear naked in a public place, the representation of nudity is in fact ubiquitous in advertising, films and photographs, depicting over and over the same idealistic and unrealistic body type(s). These under or over-representations are two sides of the same coin and reconsidering both could be a first step to creating more inclusive representations of the female body. I imagined this project as a collaboration with my grandmother, building on her personal reflection around self-image, her age and the way people look at her, which she agreed to share with me. The experience of nakedness was one of the ways she redefined her connection with her body. Through photography, we tried to create new pictures of a kind of body we are not used to seeing: a woman’s body, old, naked, moving, standing, claiming her strength and beauty, sharing her experience of ageing.