About This Project

Julie Batteux

The project “Du und Ich” (You and I) is an oingoing project since 2016 and a story about different identities, the coexistence between humans and nature, and my own fantasies. All are reminiscent of surreal, bizarre, monstrous, and obscene imagery. The photos show very personal insights into my social environment. Our mutual influences on each other created the image motifs; the title “You and I” is intended to illustrate this mutual interaction. Since the beginning of my artistic work, I have been fascinated by analog photography and I like to capture scenes without a lot of frills and work with the given lighting situation. Each photo was taken in a different place and time. But what they all have in common is that they are portraits of close friends, former partners, family members, and fellow students. The pictures are intended to represent the facets of human behavior such as fear, strength, sadness, joy, closeness, and affection. The stories are intended to encourage openness, acceptance, awareness, self-reflection and liberty. In the meantime, the relationships with the respective people have changed, they have rearranged themselves, become distant, caused pain, or have grown. The photography has archived and frozen the encounter and keeps the memory alive. A lot of trust, affection, and humanity resonate in the tender and intimate moments. The chosen location, the backdrop, stands for privacy and forms the set in which my stories are told. There are picture stories, inspired by different backdrops in the free, wild nature or in intimate living spaces. The existing architecture serves as a natural-grown stage set. I try to combine the private and the staged, and I experiment with the apparent opposites of closeness and distance, intimacy and alienation. I have been influenced by role models such as Francesca Woodman and Nan Goldin in my portraits of women. They showed me how a sensitive portrayal of intimate nudity without objectification is possible. The female portrait has long been dominated by male and binary-gaze systems, so it is all the more important that female artists show their view of the female body. It is no secret that we are surrounded and influenced by male-dominated images. It is all the more important to break this dogma and show society in its diversity; the female-gaze approach gives this idea a name.

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