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Visitor by Vincent Ferrané (b. 1974, French) is a series of photographs of women artists in their studio in Paris.

The artist atelier is not just any space. Often secret, intimate and complex, it is a zone of freedom and experimentation but also of hard work and doubts; a place of « mise en abyme » for the artist and the work of art, where every detail can make sense. For women artists, things have changed for the better since Linda Nochlin’s scathing statement on art history and institutions in her 1971 pioneering essay Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? However, being sometimes in the majority in art schools, women artists are still under-represented in the art world in 2018.

Visitor strives to find the right distance to capture the mystery, extreme tension and commitment of artistic work. The corpus of images are based on the subtle balance of portraits of women artists who are not in an archetypal representation but who can be guessed by touches through their process, gestures, tools, and the relation between their body and the piece of art that they are creating. Can being a woman be considered as one element among others; sometimes essential, especially for the artists who have strategically chosen to place it as the center of their creation—sometimes secondary or incidental? Stepping aside from an idea of a curation under the main criterion of being a woman or a gender study, Visitor invites to discover the space and the precious time of the creation contained in a work in progress—to observe what makes history in the studio of these seventeen women artists.

In order of appearance: Amélie Bertrand, Apolonia Sokol, Caroline Corbasson, Chloé Quenum, Eva Nielsen, Georgia Russell, Jeanne Briand, Jennifer Caubet, Julie Beaufils, Lucille Uhlrich, Marion Verboom, Mathilde Denize, Maude Maris, Mimosa Echard, Mireille Blanc, Sarah Trouche and Zoé de Soumagnat.

The portrayed artists are all part of the emerging art scene and work in Paris within varied artistic practices, such as painting, sculpture, installation, performance, etc.