Fictional Realities: Exploring the Art of Staged Photography

"Fictional Realities: Exploring the Art of Staged Photography"

from Saturday, June 28, 2025 to Saturday, September 13, 2025

14, rue des Jardins Saint-Paul, 75004 Paris

Staged photography lies at the intersection of constructed imagery and visual storytelling. Far from documentary or testimonial approaches, it offers a fictional, elaborate, and theatrical universe where every element contributes to the narrative.

Paolo Ventura, Anja Niemi, Scarlett Hooft Graafland, Clark & Pougnaud, Tingting Wang, Ziqian Liu, and Patty Carroll rethink the role of the artist as a mediator between the visible and the invisible, the real and the imaginary.

Paolo Ventura (Italy, 1968) builds miniature worlds where the melancholy of the past meets the magic of theater. His photographs evoke blurry memories and a reinvented past. Deeply narrative, his work is influenced by illustration, cinema, and literature, where artifice becomes a source of emotion.

Anja Niemi (Norway, 1976), on the other hand, embodies her own characters. She plays with duality, performance, and disguise. Through a controlled aesthetic, she stages a quest for identity, questioning femininity and imposed roles. She transforms the camera into a psychological mirror, using fiction as a means of introspection.

Scarlett Hooft Graafland (Netherlands, 1973) works at the crossroads of installation, performance, and photography. Her images, created in extreme locations (deserts, Arctic landscapes, Andean plateaus), are both ephemeral and meticulously composed. The objects she inserts into the landscape disrupt the natural order and question our relationship with culture and the environment, while maintaining a poetic and absurd dimension.

Clark and Pougnaud (France, 1963/1962) combine photography and digital painting. Their staged scenes recall the world of theater or cinema, with characters frozen in graphic, colorful settings. Realism is deliberately distorted, giving the scenes a strange, almost surreal atmosphere. Inspired by artistic movements such as Symbolism and Surrealism, they create photographic tableaux where the intimate meets the fantastical.

Patty Carroll (USA, 1946) explores the disappearance of the individual behind domestic conventions. In her series Anonymous Women, she hides women under fabrics, objects, or decor, humorously and critically questioning the expectations placed on women in private spaces. Her saturated, playful photography, beneath its kitschy appearance, reveals a deep societal reflection.

Ziqian Liu (China, 1990) stages her own body in minimalist compositions where mirrors, flowers, and gestures interact with light. Her face is hidden, fragmented, reflected: identity becomes form, suggestion, silence. At the crossroads of self-portrait and still life, her photography explores intimacy with grace, balance, and restraint.

Tingting Wang (China, 1986) creates carefully staged images blending symbolism, personal memory, and Chinese cultural references. Her visual world, rich in color and texture, questions feminine identity, the body, and tradition. Each photograph becomes a narrative painting, between dream and introspection, where refined aesthetics often mask deeper tension.

These artists, each in their own way, stage the image as a space of fiction, a place for reflection on identity, memory, social roles, or collective imagination. They remind us that photography, far from being merely a witness to reality, can be a tool for total creation—a stage where what cannot be said otherwise is played out.