Icônes

In this project I wanted to work on the confrontation of my own body with that of the police. How do I feel when I try to take pictures of them? How do I feel about their postures and attitudes, about their ways of controling their image? A feeling of helplessness and dominance fills me. They have total power over my image, while they control their own representation. When I tried, it was almost impossible for me to dare to take a picture of them. So I decided to capture this relationship between our image and our bodies in another way. During one semester, i asked every police-officer I came across to take a picture of me. I was voluntarily offering them my image, my body. This serie of images is therefore from the hand of the police, they produced it without being aware of it. The work consists of an edition, composed of all the photos of me, taken by the police, and a photographic print. This photograph shows the act of a police officer taking my image, unaware that the scene is being captured. His face is blurred, anonymised, non-representable, mine is not. Since the various controversial repressions surrounding the right of civilians to film police interventions, this entity tends to take the form of a quasi-religious icon, an intangible and unrepresentable body.