NSFW | Featured Photographer: La Fille Renne - “Reclaiming Our Bodies: Systemic, Gynecological, and Obstetric Violence Towards Our Sexes in the Framework of Health”
“Adèle” by La Fille Renne | Model: @adblackbox
La Fille Renne––non-binary photographer, film director, tattoo artist, and co-director of feminist media, Polysème Magazine––gives insight and intimacy to their series, Reclaiming Our Bodies: Systemic, Gynecological, and Obstetric Violence Towards Our Sexes in the Framework of Health, a project that brings awareness through photography issues of gynecological and obstetrical violence against women, non-binary people, and transgender men.
“I started this project during the first French confinement due to the COVID crisis,” says La Fille Renne. “All the previous year I had already worked a lot on the taboos of menstruation, masturbation, and vulvas. I wanted to continue my work in this direction, but also by doing research and by using my experience as a user of French gynecology. I find that very often the works on gynecological and obstetrical violence are not inclusive (trans women, trans men and non-binary people are forgotten, for example) and only approach this violence under the prism of sexism and not of the other discriminations which are [also] very present [such as] racism, grossophobia, validism, and putophobia. I also wanted to link gynecological and obstetrical violence with the systemic violence done to our genitals in the context of health and hygiene…and of course to talk about the reappropriations and solutions that activists and other users are implementing in France.”
Born and currently based in Lyon, France (with plans to move to Scotland or Finland in the near future), La Fille Renne has been shooting photos since the age of 10, when their father gave them one of his film cameras. They went on to obtain degrees in biology and bioarchaeology, and was a high school biology and geology teacher for several years before becoming a full-time artist. La Fille Renne recounts an experience teaching teenagers sex education that continues to drive their work in educating people and dispelling taboos surrounding sexuality: “When I was a teacher, none of my 14-year-old students could tell me what a vulva is. How can you respect organs or denounce the violence and mutilation inflicted on them if you don't even know that these organs exist? When you are assigned female at birth, you are made to believe that many products are necessary for your hygiene (intimate hygiene, hair removal, etc.) whereas a certain number are toxic. Industrialists play on the injunctions to beauty and the shame of our bodies and our hygiene to make money. It's also difficult to fight against this without knowledge of your own body. By discovering what activists are doing around gynecological self-help and the denunciation of gynecological violence [and] by reading everything I could about obstetrical violence, I also started to be much less terrified by pregnancy, with the idea of ‘knowledge is power.’”
“Birdy” by La Fille Renne | Model: @birdy.s_closet
“Lou” by La Fille Renne | Model: @lou_mara.e
The biggest challenges in Reclaiming Our Bodies have been the amount of work––the research, interviewing, transcribing, and writing taking a year to complete in addition to shooting photos––and the complications of social media censorship. La Fille Renne says that some of the participants’ testimonies and images which involve menstrual blood, vulvas, or dicklits (transformation of the clitoris after taking testosterone) “are not directly related to violence, but rather come from a desire to reappropriate. These images are obviously absolutely not publishable” on platforms like Instagram and Facebook. Yet social media has been instrumental in connecting with people who are eager to share their personal stories to gain power over their own bodies. “I started to photograph friends to produce the first images [of the project],” La Fille Renne says, “and the rest was done by call for collaborations on social networks. More than 300 people have contacted me in two years.” An astonishing and encouraging number of people, and testament to La Fille Renne’s caring, driven commitment to the people with whom they collaborate.
Some of the images from Reclaiming Our Bodies were recently exhibited in March 2022 at Scène Nationale d'Orléans, and La Fille Renne plans to publish a book with the interviews and images, as well as host future exhibitions. They also want to continue work on the documentation of non-normative bodies, and another long-term project about non-binarity because they feel “we are too little represented, even in queer and militant circles.” But the most life-affirming experience in working on this project has been the confidence that the participants have given to La Fille Renne: “In these testimonies I hear life stories full of violence and it touches me a lot to hear them and to be able to make them known. The subjects that touch the intimate and particularly the intimacy of women and gender minorities have long been relegated to the domain of the private, without writings and works realized from [their] point of view. I am happy to be able to do this today. It brings me a lot on a human level.”
GALLERY
ABOUT THE ARTIST
La Fille Renne is a non-binary photographer, film director, and tattoo artist from Lyon, France, who photographs on film the human, the intimate and her daily life. They are co-founder of the feminist and artistic media Polysème Magazine with Raphaëla Icguane. They also direct short films inspired by the body and sexualities on film and in collective with Laure Giappiconi and Elisa Monteil.
The documentation and representation of non-normative bodies, people, and sexualities takes an important place in their work. They think that this approach is fundamental to fight against discriminatory violence, sexual violence, and also to give better chances for young generations to be represented. Their experience as a queer person who has felt alone and monstrous for a long time makes it intolerable for them to think that young people can continue to grow up feeling this way today. In Polysème Magazine, they write articles that also tend to make visible life trajectories and victims that history––written by cisgender men––silences and makes fall into oblivion.
Experimentation also has a great place in their photographic and filmic work, like testing various films and cameras (a subject on which they published the book Review Argentique), techniques affecting the chemistry of films before the shooting, or even finding chemistries that allow them to develop films dating from the middle of the 20th century. Skin and chemical experimentations are thus mixed during sessions and political projects.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lisa Toboz is a self-taught, Pittsburgh-based artist with a background in writing and literature. Her work explores self-portraiture and creativity as a form of healing using various Polaroid cameras and film. She is inspired by vernacular photography, Victorian spirit photography, and ‘70s supernatural cinematography, as well as reading fiction. Her recent photo books include Dwell (Polyseme, 2020) and The Long Way Home (Static Age UK, 2018). Her Polaroid photography can be found in various publications including Shots Magazine, as a featured artist in She Shoots Film: Self Portraits, and Polaroid Now (Chronicle Books, 2021). A copy editor by trade, she has exhibited internationally and is represented by photographer Stefanie Schneider’s Instantdreams Gallery (Palm Springs, CA).