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Project Description: Trois Battements

After years of establishing technical credibility in commercial practice, I longed to return to the instinctual freedom I felt when first picking up a camera—when releasing the shutter was a response to sensation rather than calculation. Trois Battements marks that return.

The series was created in an empty industrial loft, intentionally removed from the precision of my studio. Stripping away high-end equipment and controlled lighting allowed limitation and uncertainty to guide the process.

I collaborated with a contemporary dancer over three sessions. In each, he was bound with different materials and documented as he worked toward release. Restraint and escape became both performance and metaphor—a meditation on confinement, resistance, and autonomy.

Day One
On the first day, the dancer was wrapped in brown paper and bound with cord. This gesture reflects how my years working in commercial photography often left me feeling packaged and commodified—less like an author of images and more like a product myself, not unlike the items I was hired to photograph for advertising.

Day Two
On the second day, the dancer was enclosed in plastic and fitted with a gas mask. The materials evoke a sense of restriction and breathlessness, symbolizing the suffocating constraints I experienced while navigating the expectations and limitations imposed by commercial clients.

Day Three
For the final day, I stitched several pairs of pantyhose together to form a long tube and drew it over the dancer’s body. The resulting form suggests compression and containment, serving as a metaphor for the pressure I felt to shape my female identity to fit within a professional field that, at the time, was largely male dominated.

The work was shot on black-and-white analogue film using a modified Holga camera. By removing the shutter’s spring mechanism, I manually controlled exposure duration, exposing each frame according to intuition rather than using a meter. The resulting blur, light leaks, and layered motion echo the dancer’s physical struggle and heighten the work’s emotional resonance.