Shoebox Studio

Shoebox features aspiring models who have travelled from all over the world to Paris, the "ogre city," where the quest for beauty thrives on fresh faces. Soon, these uprooted girls will be transformed into sophisticated creatures of universal glamour. Stéphane Coutelle, the renowned beauty photographer, is one of the architects of this transformation. However, by welcoming them to the Shoebox Studio during the initial days of their Parisian stay for a brief session, unencumbered by strict production objectives, Coutelle pays tribute to their identity and peculiarity, both perhaps even more fleeting than their youth.

This first meeting aims to capture a psychology, a past, before professional reflexes take hold, before any complicity is established. The artist works without pre-conceived ideas, open to everything. Here, the situation is not the conventional one of artist and model. The girls' looks carry questioning, expectations, but determination as well. They are aware that their fate will unfold behind the closed doors of shooting sessions, leaving little time to learn the rules of the game.

Coutelle's portraits at times trouble us, perhaps due to a perceived harshness or voyeurism on the photographer's part. Yet, in reality, these images express a certain solidarity. It is not Coutelle who is unrelenting, but the world in which both the artist and his model evolve. Shoebox is a major project because the portraits guide us from an individual psychology to the contemporary human condition, where the need to be seen and recognised has become a global quest, a social phenomenon.