Four photographers in The Feminine Gaze at IBASHO

Florence D’Elle: self-portrait, fairy tales, and collodion

D’Elle is a Belgian photographer and author. She presents work from Un Conte. In this series, she uses self-portraits and images of her daughter to explore the position of women within the symbolic world of fairy tales. For this, she employs large format photography and the collodion process.

This historical process is slow and cannot be fully controlled. Stains, irregularities, and other imperfections remain visible and become a conscious part of her visual language. Her photos thus acquire an almost timeless character. The images refer to a light and serene fairy tale world, but at the same time bear traces of violence and discomfort.

D’Elle draws her inspiration from the cinematic worlds of Jean Cocteau and Jane Campion. During the exhibition, she also presents Opprinnelsen, a book that emerged from her artist residency at the Sunnhordland Museum on the Norwegian island of Halsnøy.

Ingrid Dorner: intervening in photographic material

The Munich-based, originally French artist Ingrid Dorner shows work from three series: Liminal, Zimmer 23, and Merveille. These three series together form different stages of the same movement. Zimmer 23 revolves around an inner space, approaching the room as both a physical and psychological place. In Liminal, the focus is on the transition: the moment when something is no longer what it was, but has not yet fully become something else.

The remarkable thing is that this transformation also literally takes place in the photographic material. Dorner uses, among other techniques, mordançage, a chemical process in which parts of the photographic emulsion are affected and come loose. Time, chemistry, and manual interventions thus become part of the final image. In Merveille, there is then cautiously room for movement and imagination.

The series stems from Dorner's personal experience with her daughter's illness. The body is not viewed as a subject from the outside, but rather from a personal and lived experience.

During the exhibition, Dorner also presents her recently published book Liminal – La chimie du temps.

Birgit Graschopf: photography on sandpaper and concrete

The Vienna-based Birgit Graschopf works with staged photography in which female figures often take center stage. Her images move between the intimate and the mysterious and contain references to romance and surrealism.

In her series Still/Silence, which she created between 2022 and 2026, she goes beyond the traditional photographic print. Graschopf partially colors black-and-white images by hand and applies photographic emulsion herself on materials such as sandpaper and cast concrete. This gives the surface of the photos a pronounced physical presence.

The photographic medium is no longer just a neutral background, but becomes part of the image itself. The result moves between photography, painting, and object.

Lisen Stibeck: between what you see and what you feel

The Swedish photographer and artist Lisen Stibeck focuses on the identity of young people and the inner landscape of the human psyche in her work. She uses dreams and archetypes as a starting point, causing her photography to often lean towards magical realism.

For The Feminine Gaze, Stibeck presents the series A Quiet Distance. In this series, she explores transformation as something that does not occur at one clear moment, but as something that is experienced gradually and physically.

The series moves between the inner and outer world and between presence and disappearance. The title refers to the distance between what someone sees and what is actually felt. Stibeck calls for a slower way of looking, where there is not an immediate attempt to define or explain an image.

What does the feminine gaze mean?

Although the four photographers use very different techniques and subjects, they share a different attitude towards looking and depicting, according to the exhibition. The feminine gaze is not presented as one fixed photographic style. It is more about the question of from which position an image is made and how body, identity, and experience are approached.

This is, for example, visible in the way D’Elle photographs herself and her daughter, in Dorner's personal approach to the body, in the female figures that are central in Graschopf's staged worlds, and in Stibeck's emphasis on inner change and the space between what is seen and felt.

Also on a technical level, the approaches vary greatly. Analog processes, manual interventions, and special mediums take on an important role alongside the content of the images.

Four different photographic practices

It is precisely all these differences among the creators that make The Feminine Gaze more than an exhibition centered around one theoretical concept. From the imperfections of the collodion process by D'Elle to the chemically affected image of Dorner, the manually edited prints of Graschopf, and the more intuitive, transformation-oriented visual language of Stibeck: all four artists are searching for a way to advance photography beyond a direct recording.

In doing so, not only is attention paid to who is in front of the camera, but also to the way an image is created, shaped, and ultimately viewed by the visitor.