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Question identity through art and photography

Interview with Stéphanie Solinas
Stéphanie Solinas, Véronique Figini et Sophie Jehel
Traduction de Laurence Besnard-Scott
Cet article est une traduction de :
Interroger l’identité par l’art et la photographie [fr]

Résumé

In this interview, the artist Stéphanie Solinas presents her conception of investigation and, referring to some of her main works (Dominique Lambert, Le Pourquoi Pas? [The Why Not?], Sans Titre [Untitled] (M. Bertillon), Devenir soi-même [Become Oneself]1), helps us to understand the heuristic and imaginative potential of analogy. Exploring themes of identity, the invisible and belief, her conceptual approach to artistic creation paradoxically relates to “documentary” research, by the very fact of the methods she uses to problematise them—methods which include the invention of protocols that integrate, mimic, or distort scientific, police, medical, even ethnographic inquiry procedures, in a poetic and often critical manner.

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Notes de l’auteur

Interview conducted in Octobre 2022

Texte intégral

1Since its inception, visual artist Stéphanie Solinas has contributed to the atelier-laboratoire (tutorial programme) on sociophotography, supporting photography students at the ENS Louis Lumière with their creative outputs (see article “Sociophotography: A methodology for building a critical imaginaire of digital technologies” of Sophie Jehel). Her artistic process is particularly interesting in the way she weaves together a documentary dimension and a conceptual approach to investigation. This leads to the elaboration of creative protocols that incorporate experimental elements, sometimes close to interview-based and observation-based sociological approaches, with great creativity. The fundamental issues at the heart of her research—identity, belief, presence of the invisible—overlap with the key themes of the Sciences of Information and Communication (SIC). In the interview we conducted with her, we wanted to explore the question of her relation to photography and documentary.

Sophie Jehel: Dear Stéphanie, we wanted to interview you not only because you have been contributing to our atelier-laboratoire on sociophotography since its inception, but also because we think that your works, being at the crossroads of visual creation and the examination of key research issues in the sciences of information and communication, such as identity, surveillance and truth, are particularly inspiring for our project in understanding some of the contemporary orientations in photography and research-creation.

Véronique Figini: Could you tell us what your definition of documentary photography is and if your works are part of this approach? With Sophie, we have created the concept of sociophotography to refer to photographic works that don’t solely belong to the realm of documentary, but cross over freer forms of creation. Does this concept speak to you?

Stéphanie Solinas: There are several possible avenues. The first answer I could give is that, in fact, I don’t necessarily define my work. I don’t mean to avoid the question: it truly is a choice. Any definition is a framework delimiting something, which is useful, but what interests me in my practice is being in a dynamic place, a place of research with questions, rather than responses.

The place I stand for is that of the artist, in the fields of art and of photography—but these are very broad. I’m interested in moving across different practices, rather than segmenting them. Because in my work, in the end, the idea is often to bring together different perspectives [regards], different types of knowledge, different types of expertise, different fields, different stories, and to seek what connects them, rather than what separates them.

Having said that, the issue of definition interests me; I find it interesting to know how a work is received, where it echoes, how it can question the limits of definition of disciplines and may be able to create bridges.

In 2016, Gilles Saussier invited me to exhibit in dialogue with him at the Photographic Centre of Île-de-France, as part of a retrospective exhibition of his work. We worked within a form of exchange, of mirror. He’s an artist who previously worked as a photojournalist and was awarded by World Press Photo in 1990. In an interview with Étienne Hatt for Art Press magazine, he talks about my work in relation to this documentary dimension.

V.F.: This meeting between your profile and his profile is fascinating.

(Stéphanie Solinas looks for the article and reads out loud a passage)

S.S.: The article (Hatt, 2016) begins like this: asked “What, today, differentiates reportage and documentary work??,” he responds “four distinctive traits of documentary work: the predominance of portraiture (whereas photojournalism privileges genre or action scenes), portraits of people just as much as buildings (as Lincoln Kirstein said about Walker Evans’s American Photographs), industrial structures for Bernd and Hilla Becher, plants for Karl Blossfeldt; a preference for suites of photos whose logic is not that of a photo essay and still less symbolic images, but rather that of an underlying protocol, which makes documentary practice akin to conceptualism and artist’s books (John Baldessari, Ed Ruscha, Dan Graham); a passion for collection, in the cases of Bernd Becher and Evans, for whom a photographer was a collector who collects with his eyes; and, finally, a penchant for playing the rag-picker of history for whom the most telling things are not what posterity thinks but what didn’t last, fleeting things and other items plucked from the trashcan of yesteryear.[…] Based on these criteria, and despite appearances. Stéphanie Solinas is a perfect example of a documentary photographer.” (Laugh)

That’s what I had in mind. Perhaps it’s a long ellipsis to come to this, but…

S.J.: Excellent! We can then call you a documentary photographer.

V.F.: The “despite appearances” is fascinating.

S.S.: (Laugh) Yes, because my work has often been referred to as conceptual too. And I thought it was interesting, in fact, that Gilles would use such an argument. And I believe that there is a conceptual dimension and a documentary dimension in my work. I have a real attachment to words [parole], to be closer in that way to the reality of this matter which often shapes it [my work].

S.J.: In your work, the investigative dimension is both a source of inspiration and of imagination. But when you say, “the field of photography is broad,” it’s also because you go much beyond the field of photography. You may use sculpture, folding, you may organise a symposium, in the poetic sense of the term.

  • 2 To Dominique, the most chosen unisex first name in France, Stéphanie Solinas associates Lambert, th (...)

S.S.: Yes, for example, in my work Dominique Lambert,2 I speak about a consultative comity.

S.J.: (Laugh) This detournement of words is delightful. Because you deal with subjects such as identity and surveillance by establishing shifts in terms, like the consultative comity for example, don’t you?

S.S.: The Consultative Comity for the Description of Dominique Lambert, yes, that’s the exact term.

V.F.: I wouldn’t have described your work as documentary photography because given all the references you offered, you do something completely different. I think we haven’t yet come up with the right terms to describe your work.

S.S.: (Laugh) If you find them… I am interested.

V.F.: I will think about it because what’s fascinating is the way in which you approach this definition by saying “From the place where I stand.”

S.S.: One is always in a specific place. Then, it’s not necessarily simple to define this very place. And maybe it’s precisely the other that helps us situate ourselves. It is by going deeper into the limits of pre-determined categories that, perhaps, we also learn about this place from where we speak, and which may be difficult to define as such.

The issue of protocol is important for me, like those of methods and techniques. The different stages I use, I’m talking of Dominique Lambert, the different tools of identity representation I use, are official tools. What interests me is that any tool of representation is not neutral, any process of representation is not neutral. Each time, there is a transmission of information—that’s why we use it— but there is also a loss of information and a creation of information in this transmission.

In the systems using police sketches and figures of expertise, this dimension of loss and creation of information tends to be eliminated. What interests me in Dominique Lambert is, rather than eliminating it, to utilise it, and to look at this very place which in any case is inevitable.

That’s why the work of Alphonse Bertillon, the inventor of forensic anthropometry in the 19th century, is a work that continues to attract me: because of this belief in photographic objectivity and in the objectivity of representation, on which he based his system. In the end, all his system attests to the impossibility of the objectivity of representation—by writing two hundred pages on signaletic photography (the title of his book published in 1885), he clearly says that photography is not signaletic as such. That photography is not a sampling of the real. And, at the same time, that it is not completely surpassed, that’s why it’s still on our ID cards. All his system aims to circumscribe it but, paradoxically, makes its imperfect, human and creative dimension perceptible, and that’s what interests me.

V.F.: When I work on photography, I often think about Edgar Morin’s complexity theory. François Cheval argued that the “photographic” is what helps ultimately to better circumscribe, if anything, photography in all its forms. Photography is a material that fits all forms, that is everywhere. What’s your view on the term “photographic”?

S.J.: What characterises your approach, Stéphanie, is it not rather to question photography?

S.S.: Yes, I’m interested to question photography. It is in my relation to Bertillon’s work that it became apparent to me that photography is a tool that has established us as individuals in our unicity faced with the collective, as well as in a necessary relation to the collective for us to exist. And it is a way of being in the world and of looking at the world too.

It is the dimension of the tool and of technique. Photography belongs to a time of human history which, it seems to me, is still ongoing today: the 19th century relation to science and positivism, to this idea of seeing better. Today, our belief in materialist science, which considers that the world can simply be explained through relational materialist phenomena, belongs to this genealogy. It seems to me that photography is both a product of this very era and, at the same time, from the very beginning, also a tool for questioning this reality. Since, as early as the 19th century, it is used as part of scientific processes—the astronomer Jules Janssen refers to photography as “the retina of the scientist”—as well as in spiritualism to capture subtle and invisible presences.

That’s the reason why scientists, scholars and 19th century figures are present in my work. It is Charcot’s “why not?,” a mixture of doubt and will, and it is a curiosity which tackles all fields of knowledge. In the 19th century, photography is simultaneously used to capture ghosts from a spiritualist perspective and to photograph delinquents from a scientific perspective—always as a tool to advance knowledge.

V.F.: What I appreciate in your work is the encyclopaedic aspect.

S.S.: Yes, it’s an impulse, and at the same time I’m precisely not a 18th century encyclopaedist, nor a 19th century police officer (Laugh). I truly am a 21st century artist, I’ve also absorbed the absurd dimension of the encyclopaedia, its impossibility. I live in the world of the internet (Laugh).

S.J.: When you say that you wanted to show the impossibility of the encyclopaedia, the impossibility of objectivity, would you endorse this term of critical documentary photography?

S.S.: What matters to me is to not take recent inventions for eternal truth, like questioning what is sometimes given as immutable. That’s why the issue of history interests me, at least that of the lineage of ideas and tools. Therefore, critical as necessitating reflection, in the sense of critical thinking, in that sense, yes.

  • 3 Jean-Claude Lemagny was one of the first curators in France to introduce contemporary photography i (...)

V.F.: It’s critique according to Kant, it’s effectively the examination of limits. Jean-Claude Lemagny3 supported this position.

S.S.: When you talk about the issue of limits, I come back to this “why not?,” which for me is a powerful formulation. Jean-Martin Charcot, the first neurologist, had asked his son as a child: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” The little Jean-Baptiste’s answer was: “Sailor.” To his father who had responded by saying “Nonsense!,” the child had said: “Why not?” When aged 18 he tried to go down this road, his father told him: “You will study medicine.” And so, he became a doctor like his father, at the Salpêtrière Hospital like his father. But when his father died, he left everything and had his first boat built which he named the Pourquoi Pas?.

Years later, he met his own death in the Pourquoi Pas? IV after his boat sank ten kilometres from Reykjavik. I borrow this name for my work [The Why Not?] which explores the invisible worlds emerging from Iceland, whether from the world of the dead, the world of elves, the telluric forces, or from genetic links. I like this idea of standing by this line of a “why not?.” It is not therefore a matter of taking position to say whether it exits or not, whether one should believe in it or not.

Myself, I don’t see them, so I have to see them through other people’s eyes. But what interests me is that these testimonies really exist. I want to bring them my attention and, thanks to them, widen the field of possibilities and see what happens. Since, be they real or not, these invisible forms have an impact in the real.

For a lot of people I have met, their life choices are based on this very invisible. Ultimately, the question is: what are we to do if indeed “why not?,” and what does it do, what is the effect of this “why not?” in the real? It’s opening up a field of possibilities, and making room for the invisible, that’s why I talked about the issue of categorisations and of limits, to explore places of porosity.

S.J.: You say: “I don’t take sides”; but in reality, what you work on is not so much on the object of beliefs but on beliefs themselves. What you are staging are social approaches, which are the social reality of these beliefs, through the range of media you use and the testimonies you gather. In a somehow scientific way, you draw upon what exists from these beliefs, that is to say the beliefs themselves. In your creations, you commend them to some extent, for example in the parallel you make between the form of the human brain, Iceland’s geography and that of the mediumistic points. There is an anthropological dimension in your work, isn’t it?

S.S.: What is certain is that I care deeply about this question of belief, which is what shapes us, which is simultaneously something very physical, very corporeal, something observable, and it’s also our memory, the generations preceding us, our spirituality, our beliefs.

  • 4 See her series of works The Unexplained (2018). In Italy, Stéphanie Solinas examines bodies as poin (...)

How can we grasp what is a human being in its complexity? How can we access the invisible that shapes us? It’s precisely why photography, or even the recognition process of miracles,4 interest me. How a framework and tangible tools are produced to access something that is not at all like that and turn it into something that can be shared. Hence this imperative to use representation.

The question of identity lies here. But at the same time, I think this term is complicated. I’d love to be able to lay it on a table, just like that, and say: “here it is, this is what I am, this is what we are,” but of course it resists; and just as well that it resists—because what shapes us is also in this resistance. What eludes us too is the substance that shapes us and, without a doubt, its most singular aspect. Therefore, my work also seeks to grasp what is elusive in this process of representation.

V.F.: There is a lot of humour in your work too, but I would say that it’s a serious humour.

S.S.: Humour is important and belongs to poetry. I feel that it’s part of our acceptance of the human condition (Laugh). There are so many questions and so little answers.

S.J.: Compared to conceptual artists, I’m struck by the complexity of the protocols you invent, which is probably related to a good knowledge of scientific systems. You give them a slightly parodic dimension, but through an ethical reflection. The idea that identity cannot be contained is an ethical and even political point of view.

  • 5 On the West coast of the USA, Becoming Oneself explores the dialogue between science and belief tha (...)

S.S.: I would not necessarily say “parodic.” For me, this shift, this step to the side, has more to do in its functioning with analogy. I see it as a way to discover a new aspect of something believed to be known. And in fact, if a displacement is brought into play, we see things in a completely different way, it is the principle of analogy. I’m thinking about my work set in Iceland [The Why Not?], but also in Italie [The Unexplained] and the USA [Becoming Oneself5], in the sense that each time I work with a geographic analogy between physical territories and territories of beliefs. For in the end, this territory of beliefs is not observable, it can’t be looked at. And this relation to geography, this island turning into a brain, maybe it’s humorous and maybe it’s a parody, but it’s also a way to transpose geographic concepts that are more widely shared because more visible, and to give us access to a way of thinking, to the invisible out of concrete reality.

Therefore, this step to the side is a creative dimension of analogy.

Photography 1

Photography 1

Sans titre (M.Bertillon) - Deux faces.

Author: Stéphanie Solinas, 2011. Work protected by the author’s right (copyright).

Photography 2

Photography 2

Le soleil ni la mort [extrait], Twelve West Coast Stations III, Devenir soi-même.

Author: Stéphanie Solinas, 2022. Work protected by the author’s right (copyright).

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Bibliographie

Hatt, E. (2026, May). “Gilles Saussier pour un documentaire expérimental. Interview par Étienne Hatt” [Gilles Saussier for an Experimental Documentary. Interview by Étienne Hatt], Art Press, 433.

Lemagny, J.-C. (1992). “Le cercle d’images. Essai sur les tendances photographiques contemporaines” [The Circle of Images. Essay on Contemporary Trends in Photography], L’ombre et le temps. Essais sur la photographie comme art [Shadow and Time. Essays on Photography as Art]. Nathan.

Lemagny, J.-C. (1984). La photographie créative [Creative Photography]. Contrejour.

Solinas, S. (2010). Dominique Lambert. Alaska Éditions.

Solinas, S. (2012). Sans titre (M. Bertillon). RVB Books.

Solinas, S. (2020). Guide du Pourquoi Pas? Seuil.

Solinas, S. (2023). L’Être plus. Itinéraire pour Devenir soi-même. Seuil.

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Notes

1 Most of the works cited in this article can be accessed via Stéphanie Solinas’s personal site: https://www.stephaniesolinas.com/.

2 To Dominique, the most chosen unisex first name in France, Stéphanie Solinas associates Lambert, the twenty-seventh most common family name, thereby creating a sample of one hundred and ninety-one Dominique Lamberts listed in the French phone book. In the book Dominique Lambert, the artist sent by post a Chinese portrait to each of them to be filled in. From the latter, and all the Dominique Lamberts who responded, she formulated a written portrait with the help of the Consultative Comity (made of a psychologist, a statistician, a police inspector and a lawyer). Based on this text, the painter Benoît Bonnemaison-Fitte drew a portrait which was transformed into a police sketch by Dominique Ledée, a forensic police investigator. Stéphanie Solinas then searched for a model with an obvious resemblance with the police sketch and photographed it. A sealed envelope containing the identity photograph of the Dominique Lambert, author of the Chinese portrait, closes the chain of representations (2004-2010).

3 Jean-Claude Lemagny was one of the first curators in France to introduce contemporary photography in the collections of France’s national library (Bibliothèque nationale de France). He was a fervent defender of photography as art.

4 See her series of works The Unexplained (2018). In Italy, Stéphanie Solinas examines bodies as point of contact between finitude and transcendence, from physical phenomena of faith to the infinitely big of astronomy. The Unexplained is a set of pieces organised as a constellation. Its basic principle is elevation.

5 On the West coast of the USA, Becoming Oneself explores the dialogue between science and belief that is inventing the human to come. Becoming Oneself is a set of pieces organised as a network. Its basic principle is moving forward.

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Table des illustrations

Titre Photography 1
Légende Sans titre (M.Bertillon) - Deux faces.
Crédits Author: Stéphanie Solinas, 2011. Work protected by the author’s right (copyright).
URL http://journals.openedition.org/hybrid/docannexe/image/5820/img-1.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 17k
Titre Photography 2
Légende Le soleil ni la mort [extrait], Twelve West Coast Stations III, Devenir soi-même.
Crédits Author: Stéphanie Solinas, 2022. Work protected by the author’s right (copyright).
URL http://journals.openedition.org/hybrid/docannexe/image/5820/img-2.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 26k
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Pour citer cet article

Référence électronique

Stéphanie Solinas, Véronique Figini et Sophie Jehel, « Question identity through art and photography »Hybrid [En ligne], 14 | 2025, mis en ligne le 15 novembre 2025, consulté le 10 décembre 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/hybrid/5820 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/1568o

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Auteurs

Stéphanie Solinas

Visual artist, writer and researcher, Stéphanie Solinas creates works at the crossroads of photography, books and art installations. Exploring the thinking process involved in the very act of “seeing,” and the weaving of the visible and the invisible, of rationality and belief, which shapes identities, her field of investigation extends from the 19th century to the 21st century, from the birth of photography to artificial intelligence. Graduate in photography at the ENS Louis Lumière, PhD in Visual Arts, Solinas was artist in residence at the Villa Medicis in Rome and at the Headlands Center for the Arts in San Francisco. Her work has been exhibited at the SFMOMA and Getty Museum in the USA, FOAM in Amsterdam, Centre Pompidou, Jeu de Paume, Rencontres d’Arles in France. Her publications include L’Être plus and Guide du Pourquoi Pas?. https://www.stephaniesolinas.com/.

Véronique Figini

Véronique Figini lectures in the history of photography at the École Nationale Supérieure Louis-Lumière (La Cité du Cinéma) and is a member of the Centre for Studies in Media, Technologies and Internationalisation (Paris 8 University) and an associate at the Centre for Social History of Contemporary Worlds (Université Paris 1).

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Sophie Jehel

Sophie Jehel is a professor of information and communication sciences (CEMTI, Paris 8 University) and an Associate at the Analysis and Interdisciplinary Research Centre for Media (Panthéon-Assas University).

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