A book of text and image, My Birth interweaves photographs of the artist Carmen Winant’s mother giving birth to her three children with found images of other, anonymous, women undergoing the same bodily experience. As the pictorial narrative progresses, from labor through delivery, the women’s postures increasingly blend into one another, creating a collective body that strains and releases in unison.

A birth is an amazing and crazy experience. I didn’t know that before I became a mother a few months ago. It is physical, of course. It is also a social experience, a political experience, an existential experience. This is about being a body. This is love at the first sight. This is a strange day with people, strangers and husband. This is absolutely intimate and universal at the same time. I think the book tells all about that, with an elegant design, made as sketches.

Marie Quéau is one of my favorite artist. She’s also one of my best friend.

The series Handbook is a poetic map about french research laboratories where people quantify, analyse and try to understand how the nature and our bodies work . All operations and gestures seem like handmade and become a model of reality.

The book is going to be published by September books in september.

Rossellini‘s movies Viaggio in Italia and Stromboli are the intimate reason I went in Napoli and photographed ruins of Pompei and began my project Party and aches.

In these both movies, Ingrid Bergman plays a woman who has to deal with love, mariage and freedom. In both, the volcano helps her to find the truth. It is gorgeous. I think Rossellini capture something real about what the volcano (Stromboli or Vesuvio) gives to people. The volcano is a myth, a mother, a fear and a faith. It is pure and strong. The fictions are just a way to tell that.

I really love my friend Nicolas Cabos‘ series Les incidents.

“When I was a teenager, I spent hours, at night, watching television, zapping, looking for films and short films featuring people my age and looking at length for slips or moments that could lead us to believe that something was going to go wrong. With my finger on my camera or on the RECORD button on my VCR, I recorded all these images, or video fragments to gradually constitute an alphabet of what I perceived then as the essence of my desire.

Later, I equipped myself with a small camcorder that would gradually become my new sampling tool, but this time it was going to be in the people around me or that I met more or less furtively that I was going to track these “skids”. Sometimes waiting for long moments waiting for the slightest gesture, look, the slightest situation that could become an image of another nature than what it really was. These skids, or the beginnings of skids. These incidents.”

Les incidents is also a book, published by One Ink Publisher: http://one-ink.blogspot.com/2014/10/les-incidents.html

I discovered Annelies Strba’s work when I was in photography school. I was moved by these beautiful pictures of everyday life of children, growing up in a messy house. This is real and nostalgic. There are love and happiness and melancholy.

Children are sleeping with cats, play music in the kitchen. Girls become women with long hair, have babies. Time is passing, this is just life.

Annelies Strba’s eyes are so powerful and soft as the same time. The way she frames, the way she organises colors, what she captures of her everyday life are pure elegance for me.

The book continues to inspire me for my personal work and for my portrait work since ten years.

For my first post, I choose September books, my boyfriend François Santerre’s publishing house. This is all about love and making books! We live in a small appartement with our baby girl and a lot of books, in Paris. We work here, so all of our projects connect each other.

September Books is an independent publishing house specializing in photography. It realizes editorial objects close to the fanzine with a requirement of form and manufacture.

8 books were published for now.

I would like to focus on the last ones:

Les aqueuses by Rebekka Deubner

Rebekka Deubner sketches with this edition a very personal approach to the myth of Amaterasu, goddess of the sun who is said that after a conflict she took refuge in a cave, thus depriving the world of light. It is this moment of nocturnal latency, wet and swarming, that the photographs describe in as many fragments of a vast motionless picture, never seen in its totality. The landscape of the lost traveler, the sea-bed diver perceived by flash and revealed by the blinding light of the flashlight is revealed to us in expressionist snatches, inviting the viewer to share this inner journey.

I don’t want to disappear completely by Bérangère Fromont

“Summer 2015. I spend a few days in a village in Latvia. The forest is everywhere, the population rare, the plants are invasive and venomous.
I meet a group of teenagers, ghostly presence in this rough landscape frozen in the past. I ask them to make pictures with me. We stay together for a few hours.
Aïva, one of the girls in the gang spontaneously tells me stories about the village, stories of ghosts and haunted houses.
“I’m not scared of anything, I’m afraid of ghosts,” she tells me.
In this relatively inhospitable environment, life seems to fade slowly, without disappearing completely.” (Bérangère Fromont)

Le feu by me

Collection of images collected on the internet. Here put in relation by affinities, shocks, they traverse the questions of desire, fantasies, eroticism, like a flirtation, where often the imaginary feeds images.

More about September books: http://septemberbooks.org/home.html