A first

Sophie is a bodybuilder. In the photograph that Camille Vivier dedicated to her in 2018, she wears a satin dress. The body is monumental, the pose serene, the image stands on its own without commenting on its own paradox. This attention—letting the body speak for itself without glossing—has been the signature of the French photographer for twenty-five years. The MEP is dedicating its first major retrospective to her this summer. Trained at the Beaux-Arts in Grenoble and then at Central Saint Martins in London, Vivier won the photography prize at the Hyères festival in 1998 and was awarded the Villa Medici Hors-les-murs residency in 2002. From then on, she never abandoned the two scenes that distinguish her.

Her commissions appear in Dazed & Confused, Purple, Another, T Magazine, iD, Interview – the elite of magazines where fashion is conceived – while in her studio she pursues personal work focused on the body and still life. This retrospective, the first of its kind, brings together these two aspects and demonstrates that for her they are one. Her world is inhabited by gentle strangeness. Domestic objects 43}become ritualistic, mannequins carved like sculptures49, flesh lit in the manner of Flemish still lifes, interiors where something cinematic57 lurks. Sophie is just one case among many: Vivier photographs bodies – clothed on commission, nude in his series – that reject the norm without fighting it, and simply inhabit another category.