As part of the France Brazil season, Sorbonne ArtGallery, in partnership with Initial LABO, presents three Brazilian women photographers, whose vision of identity is expressed through the use of a chromatic palette as a subliminal lever for messages.

ID, for “identity”, is an exhibition of three series featured in the collection “Un fonds photographique brésilien à la BnF”: Márcia Charnizon, Angelica Dass and Juliana Sicoli.

In the history of photography, the struggle to impose color at a time when visual aesthetics were dominated by black and white is, in a way, linked to demands for a role for women in society. The “Goddesses” series by British photographer Madame Yevonde (1893-1975) from the early 1930s is a case in point, with its innovative use of color, then scorned or confined to advertising. The three Brazilian artists gathered here have in common that they combine their chromatic choices, oscillating between softness and violence, with embroidery, the Pantone grid or word-hunting games. In their feminist and, more broadly, humanist approach, it's less important to document than to make an image, and their creative choices help to denounce inequalities in relations between men and women, as well as between the various black, Amazonian and white communities that make up Brazil.

Juliana Sicoli, trained in psychoanalysis alongside her studies in photography, weaves a unique narrative in her “Ainda Assim Falo” (I'm still talking) series, interweaving archival images, paintings and cutting and sewing interventions. Through gesture and chromatic play, she seeks to excavate the surface of appearances and images to reveal deeper traumas.
For her “Humanæ” project, initiated in 2012, Angelica Dass catalogued the portraits of 4,000 people in 17 countries and 27 cities around the world, regardless of age, religion, nationality, gender or social class, photographed according to the classic standards of anthropological photography and legal portraiture (bust framing, frontal pose and lighting). She thus establishes a kind of “human palette” highlighting the diversity of skin tones in the manner of a Pantone color chart, but also enhancing the subtle continuity of our colors afin to create more equality than difference.  
As for Márcia Charnizon, in “Caça as palavras” (The Hunt for Words), she seeks to expose the violence of words spoken against women.  Here, she brings together women over 50, protagonists of their own stories, who, in a red lighting similar to the inactinic light of a silver laboratory, show the marks that stigmatizing words have left on their naked bodies.

For these three artists, the questioning of normative representations made possible by color and the hybridization of photography with other media encourage new ways of committing to the recognition of human beings in all their diversity.

Héloise Conesa, Heritage Curator, in charge of the contemporary photography collection at BnF's Département des Estampes et de la Photographie.