Vee Speers

Nationality

Australian; long based in Paris

Medium

Staged photographic portraiture

At Wild Project Gallery

WPG.09 Jardin Secret – Wild Project Gallery, Luxembourg (16 Sep – 29 Oct 2016)

Vee Speers is an Australian photographer who has lived and worked in Paris for most of her career. Her portraits are staged, frontal, and deliberately timeless: sitters face the camera against controlled grounds, in costume or partial disguise, in a muted palette closer to painting than to editorial photography. Her early series Bordello, an imagined tour of a Parisian maison close, was published as a monograph with a foreword by Karl Lagerfeld.

The series that defines her public reputation is The Birthday Party, published as a monograph by Dewi Lewis in 2008. Prompted by her daughter's birthday party, Speers photographed children in invented costumes against the same white wall, each portrait balancing innocence against something armored and faintly menacing; the series has been exhibited widely and entered private and museum collections, including the Elton John collection. She then returned to the same sitters six years on, photographing them in adolescence — work made in 2012 and shown under the titles Bulletproof and Thirteen — so that the project became a longitudinal study of the same faces crossing from childhood into its aftermath.

In 2016 she completed Botanica, in which flowers are photographed exactly as she photographs people — shot in black and white, then subtly hand-colored — each stem treated as a sitter with a bearing of its own. Botanica had its first Luxembourg presentation at Jardin Secret – Wild Project Gallery, Luxembourg (16 Sep – 29 Oct 2016), the gallery's autumn 2016 exhibition, catalogued here as WPG.09. L'Œil de la Photographie covered the show under its English title, Secret Garden. The full exhibition history, and the longer arc from The Birthday Party to the present, is kept at the Jardin Secret file.

Her most recent body of work is The King's Court (2025), presented by Jackson Fine Art in Atlanta: large chromogenic prints that turn to the extravagance of the courts of Versailles, made in collaboration with dancers and staged around performance, identity, and illusion. Coverage to date consists chiefly of gallery documentation and announcements. The file is open.