Emmanuelle Bousquet: a profile in English

Of the eleven artists indexed in this Record, Emmanuelle Bousquet is the one whose file is hardest to read in English. Her career is thoroughly documented — books with ISBNs, a listed historic monument as a shooting location, awards with named jurors, an exhibition record running from 2004 to 2025 — but almost all of that documentation is in French. What exists in English is fragmentary: a gallery page, a publisher's catalogue line, a few sentences of biography on a portfolio site. That is a statement about the coverage record, not about the work. This page is an attempt to close the gap: an English profile assembled from primary records and from the French sources that did the reporting, cited rather than reproduced.

What the coverage record actually contains

The substantive writing on Bousquet is French and thin on the ground. An essay on the Boumbang site, published for her Illusion exhibition of 2 February to 2 March 2012 at Galerie Acte 2, then at 41 rue d'Artois in the 8th arrondissement, treats the self-portrait as the whole of her method. A profile in the cultural review Wukali takes up Illusion and Whispers and identifies long exposure as her technique of that period. L'Œil de la Photographie ran a notice dated 14 December 2015 under the title "Emmanuelle Bousquet : Muses et Statues" — a description of the two series and of the Paris hang, not a review. A Luxembourg listings magazine carried the 2016 exhibition; a carte blanche published by 9 Lives Magazine on 2 July 2020 looked at the nudes. Beyond that the record is primary documents: the artist's own site, publishers' pages, gallery announcements, and the archived pages of the gallery that showed her.

Nîmes, 1979, and a red Kodak

Bousquet was born in Nîmes in 1979 and began photographing at ten, with a small red Kodak her maternal grandmother bought her. The biographical detail the French accounts repeat is the household: a family of couturiers, in which, as she has put it, fashion was her only reference point. Her earliest images are self-portraits in her mother's oversized dresses and shoes, posed the way she had watched models pose. In adolescence the practice turned inward and stopped being play. The pivot her published biography names is 2004, when she met the photographer Antoine d'Agata, who urged her to commit to self-portraiture completely and more plainly; she shut herself in a single room for a week and made Troubles, which she counts as her first real series. Her training was assembled rather than singular — a diploma from the École supérieure de journalisme in Paris, a year at UCLA extension in Los Angeles, then the SPEOS photography institute in Paris — and in July 2006 she was a laureate of the publishing prize awarded within the Photo Folio Review at the Rencontres d'Arles.

The sentence her biography has carried ever since, and which the Luxembourg gallery reprinted in English in 2016, is a working principle rather than a manifesto: "Etre mon propre modèle me permet de maîtriser chaque photographie, de faire corps avec elle" — being her own model lets her master each photograph, become one with it; the body, in her formulation, is the actor of her thoughts rather than the thing on display. Both series Luxembourg saw turn on that: a body converted into something else.

Statue: accidents in the emulsion

Statue is a body of Polaroid self-portraits in which the print's chemistry is treated as part of the subject. Bousquet provokes what she calls « des accidents » — cracks, mould blooms, serrated edges, chemical precipitations induced in the print — which, as the December 2015 notice put it, form a hinge between surface and volume, between photograph and sculpture. The pictures mask the face and concentrate on the body; the decay of the emulsion does the rest of the work, pulling the figure toward stone.

Her own statement for the series describes a person split in two: one half made cold and unfeeling by society, the other still fighting to keep its warmth — "Une dualité, mi statue, mi humain," a duality half statue, half human. It was published by Filigranes Éditions on 15 October 2015 as Sous une pierre amante, co-produced with acte2 Galerie, Paris: 64 pages, 17 × 24 cm, thirty colour photographs, hardback, French and English, with a text by a psychoanalyst and art critic, ISBN 978-2-35046-371-1. The thirty plates were read at the time as fifteen pairings of women of stone with women of flesh. A head-of-print run offered a choice of three images, each printed in seventeen signed copies at 15 × 21 cm; the publisher records those as long since exhausted.

Muses: the theatre behind 6 rue de Saintonge

Muses is the counterweight, and it begins with a building. The series was photographed in a small theatre hidden at the back of a courtyard behind 6 rue de Saintonge in the 3rd arrondissement of Paris, built in 1796 under the Directoire and known as the Théâtre des Muses or the Théâtre du Boudoir des Muses. The building has been a listed historic monument since 1972. The history attached to it — closed in 1807 on Napoleon's order, on the grounds that the women displaying themselves there had insufficiently strict morals; "rediscovered" in 1965 at the back of a court that until the Revolution had housed the Convent of the Filles du Calvaire — is repeated in the artist's own account and in Paris local-history writing, and is best read as received local history rather than archival proof.

What Bousquet does with the room is refuse to dress it. Her statement for the series is explicit that there are no scene reconstructions and no imported décor: the place is photographed as it stands, and into it she brings young women, idle and pleasure-taking, as she imagines them in the period. Behind them, in the gallery's 2016 description of the work, she set spectral erotic self-portraits in the second plane. Convent then brothel, between the Virgin and the woman of the night, the series holds a room where time has stopped. She dates Statue 2015–2017 on her own site and keeps Muses open at 2015–2025. In 2024 the theatre reopened as a hotel; the location of the series is no longer the location she found.

Luxembourg, spring 2016

The two series travelled together, and along the gallery's own lineage. They were shown first in Paris as Statue et Muses at acte2galerie, 9 rue des Arquebusiers, with a vernissage on 3 December 2015 and a run from 4 December to 16 January 2016 — acte2galerie being the Paris photography gallery founded in 1999 by the same founder who would open the Luxembourg space, a continuity set out in the Record. Three months later the pair crossed the border. Muses – Wild Project Gallery, Luxembourg (17 Mar – 23 Apr 2016), catalogued here as WPG.04, was the third exhibition on the gallery's own list, following In Memoriam and Disorder, and the gallery's news page announced it as Bousquet's first showing in Luxembourg. Admission was free. The exhibition page preserved in the web archive lists two portfolios of eight images each — STATUE, eight images, and MUSES, eight images — which is the only checklist of the Luxembourg hang that survives. No installation views are in the public record, and no review of the Luxembourg presentation has been located; the gap is noted rather than filled.

One discrepancy belongs on the page rather than in a footnote. This site's chronology carries WPG.04 as running 17 March to 23 April 2016, the dates the gallery's own archived exhibitions and news pages both give — 17 mars – 23 avril 2016, and, on the news page, du 17 MARS au 23 AVRIL 2016. A Luxembourg listings entry gives 18 March to 23 April, and the Wix site that later replaced the gallery's pages dated the show 16 March. The closing date of 23 April is agreed by every source that states one. The catalogue follows the gallery's own pages; the reconciliation is set out in the corrections log.

Before and after the rue Louvigny

Her exhibition record is longer than her English footprint suggests, and it did not pause when the gallery did. Before Luxembourg: the Palais de Tokyo with the Hype Gallery in 2004; Arles in 2006 and a retrospective projection at the Voies Off festival there in 2007; a Mois de la Photo OFF solo in Paris in 2008; New York in 2010; the Illusion book and solo, and Art Paris at the Grand Palais on the acte2galerie stand, in 2012; PAD Paris with acte2galerie in 2015. In 2016 alone she showed Muses and Statue in Brussels, Illusion in Kiev, and joined a self-portrait group show in Cologne. After: a 2018 Paris solo and the Filigranes book Stigmate, with an honourable mention for Muses at the twelfth Pollux Award that year; a win in the nude and figure category at the thirteenth Julia Margaret Cameron Awards in 2019 for Sisters, alongside in foetu, a pregnancy series issued by Éditions Bessard; a museum solo at Eygalières in 2020; a Paris solo drawn from Haute Couture in 2021 and a group showing at the Monnaie de Paris; "De leur temps" at the FRAC Grand Large in Dunkirk in 2023; Paris Photo and Private Choice in 2024; and, in 2025, Berlin, Megève, and a monographic exhibition at a Paris gallery from 2 to 15 October drawing on Muses, Sens Obscurs and Haute Couture. Two decades, and the through-line has not moved: a body — usually hers — put under pressure until it turns into material.

Wild Project Gallery held her for five weeks in the spring of 2016 and then moved on to the next show; the gallery itself lasted little more than a year after that, and the arc is set out in the chronology. The rest of the file — biography, series, the continuing exhibition record — is kept in the Bousquet dossier, and it is open. Anyone able to date, correct or extend it, particularly with documentation of the Luxembourg hang, can do so through the contact page.