Les amis (Patreon)

Germain Krull took a serie of photographs that she called “les amis”, 1924.
Those photographs that would inspire Chantal Akerman some years later to create the luscius and exquisite images of Julie and her lover in bed for the film “je, tu, il, elle”, have always been in my imaginary.
I had met Ksenia 24 h before I took these pictures.
I love the intimacy enviroment between us, as if two lovers that are still discovering and savouring every inch of their bodies.


"Throughout Les Amies, Krull repeatedly obscures the models’ anatomy, oscillating between inviting the spectator’s desiring gaze and frustrating the clarity such a gaze requires. As Abigail Solomon-Godeau observed
about the « lesbian » scenes staged for nineteenth-century daguerreotypes, « [W]omen together . . . are typically posed in ways that provide the viewer with maximum visual access to their bodies. » These conventions continue into the twentieth century, yet Krull’s models fold their arms across their faces, tilt their heads so their pageboy hairstyles hide their eyes and press their bodies so close together that their breasts are partly hidden. Even more surprising, in not a single image does a model directly gaze out at the camera. The standard acknowledgment of the viewer of erotic material, the address to the third party outside the image, never takes place. These models remain hermetically sealed in the studio, failing to address the frustrated desiring gaze, to symbolically invite the third party to join the sexual adventures taking place. Despite the direct view of the crotch in one image and the depictions of cunnilingus, the eroticism is contained between the two women, with no imaginary space for a third, presumably male, viewer to enter."

"Germaine Krull was a pioneer in the fields of avant-garde photomontage, the photographic book, and photojournalism, and she embraced both commercial and artistic loyalties. Born in Wilda-Poznań, East Prussia, in 1897, Krull lived an extraordinary life lasting nine decades on four continents—she was the prototype of the edgy, sexually liberated Neue Frau (New Woman), considered an icon of modernity and a close cousin of the French garçonne and the American flapper."