Photographer Lorraine Alexandre is the Edge of Humanity Magazine contributor of this photo essay. From the project ‘Fragments’. To see Lorraine ’s body of work, click on any photograph.

This series follows in the footsteps of what I call my “photographic epiphanies,” which give rise to derivative works through encounters with performing artists. Here, I reinterpret “Le Goujon folichon” by Julien Fanthou, which evokes a cabaret inspired by the history of this brothel on the banks of the Seine, once run by his great-grandmother. This inseparable figure and place, as unsettling as it is fascinating, from his childhood, become the subject of a performance.

A closed and ambivalent universe built through a selection of tender and cruel songs highlighting gender relations, their games and their dead ends…

I have extensively explored the question of identity staging through the lens of masculine and feminine genders. I initially focused on the study of spectacular and media-driven images of women since the late 19th century before turning my attention to the observation of masculinity. This series allows me to stage and connect these two figures. Two men embody two very distinct archetypes of masculinity: one a socialite who subtly transforms into an iconic figure of femininity, a cabaret woman, a sequined siren.

Beyond this bridge between genres, which underscores their theatrical and codified nature, this series also reveals the relationship between the body and different musical instruments. The models’ bodies brush against each other, intersect, or embrace, just as they do with their instruments; instruments whose physical impact is far from neutral: the back arched by the weight of the accordion, the position of the fingers so completely devoted to the music that it loses all naturalness…

This encounter and this adaptation of bodies and objects that come into contact with them, which I am restaging here, are at the heart of my work as an artist.