Doctorate Details
(2017-2023)
Ph.D. in Art History
University: University of Paris Nanterre (France)
Defense Year: 2023
Thesis Director: Thierry Dufrêne
Ph.D. in Art Studies
University: Université du Québec en Outaouais (Canada)
Defense Year: 2023
Thesis Director: Mélanie Boucher
La survivance du vivant en photographie
The Survival of the Living in Photography
Public Defense Date: September 18, 2023
Jury composed of:
- Pavel Pavlov, professor in art practice, Université du Québec en Outaouais
- Maxime Coulombe, professor in contemporary art, Université Laval
- Chiara Palermo, lecturer in aesthetics, University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne
- Fabrice Flahutez, professor in art history, University of Lyon-Saint-Étienne, Jean Monnet University
Thesis Summary:
Over the past decade, prestigious awards in portrait photography have increasingly been granted to images depicting robots. Such recognitions are striking, insofar as these prizes are ostensibly intended to reward representations of human subjects. As a robot constitutes an object, such photographs would traditionally fall within the category of still life and should, in principle, be disqualified. Beyond challenging established photographic categories, these award-winning works offer critical insights into contemporary perceptions of the human body, now conceived as increasingly proximate to inanimate objects.
A form of “survival of the living” (Aby Warburg, 2015 [2003]; Georges Didi-Huberman, 2002, p. 191) appears to resurface in these images, despite processes of reification and unsuccessful attempts at anthropomorphization. Echoes of earlier visual traditions further activate this notion of survivance. The fantasy of animation has permeated artistic production since Antiquity—most notably in Ovid’s myth of Pygmalion—and has also shaped modern language, particularly since 1906, when the term “mannequin” came to designate not only an anthropomorphic object but also a fashionable woman embodying contemporary ideals of elegance.
The fashion photographer Helmut Newton appropriates this semantic shift, mobilizing it through sensual imaginaries that emerge from the association between body and object. In parallel, recent technological developments affecting the transformation of the living—such as cosmetic surgery and cloning—have generated renewed interest in altered corporeality, while simultaneously intensifying the stakes of perceptual and ontological confusion.
Within the arts, the performed body often reifies the living through its uncanny stillness before spectators who retain their mobility. The photographic practice of Cindy Sherman extends this dynamic further, producing inert images that nonetheless exhibit a striking elasticity. The face, in particular, appears so malleable that it is reduced to a mere human surface, emptied of subjectivity.The widespread development of digital technologies has further enabled the expansion and deformation of the limits of human representation.
The photographer Nick Knight, for his part, investigates the persistence of a residual impression of life, even as the body undergoes transformations approaching abstraction. Across historical periods, the confusion between body and object has been shaped by diverse social and political forces, often contradictory, thereby revealing the variability and singularity of ambiguous representations oscillating between humanization and reification.
Through the lens of both continuities and ruptures inherent to these confusions between body and object, this dissertation examines how the living continues to emerge within the photographic practices of Helmut Newton, Cindy Sherman, and Nick Knight. Its aim is to understand the impact of inertness on both the representation and conceptualization of the living body. Ultimately, it argues that photography produces a singular relation to the living that differs fundamentally from the organic body as experienced in everyday life, as well as from the performed body or the moving body in video.
Keywords: fashion; art; photography; inertness; mannequin; body; living; survivance