Eva and Irina Ionesco
Related: lolita - French culture - actress - Maladolescenza (1977) - Pier Giuseppe Murgia - The Tenant (1976) - Roman Polanski
Eva Ionesco (1965 - )
Eva Ionesco (born on July 18, 1965) is a French actress, born in Paris, France. She is the daughter of photographer Irina Ionesco.
At the age of 5, Eva becomes her mother's favourite photo model. Irina Ionesco's erotic photo of her young daughter Eva have been a source of controversy since they first appeared in the 1980s. Eva also modeled for other photographs such as Jacques Bourboulon.
Eva Ionesco made her movie début at the age of eleven in 1976, playing a child in Roman Polanski's movie Le Locataire. A short time later she was cast in lolita roles for polemical soft porn movies of the mid seventies like Spermula and Maladolescenza.
In the eighties, she attended the prestigious acting school 'Amandiers', directed by Patrice Chéreau and Pierre Romans. With her glamorous look and high pitched voice, she soon became a familiar face as second role actress for the young french cinema. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eva_Ionesco [Apr 2005]
Jacques Bourboulon
Jacques Bourboulon is a French photographer, specialized in nude photography of very young girls. He started as a fashion photographer, but switched to nude photography in the mid seventies. The summit of his career was in the late seventies and early eighties.
Contrary to David Hamilton, who photographed the same subject, his pictures focus on bright light and sharp contrasts. His most typical pictures were shot on the Spanish island of Ibiza, playing on the juxtaposition of blue sky, white walls and sun-tanned skin. His pictures also include fetishist details, such as white socks or underwear, and oiled up bodies. The models often take very similar poses, leading to repetitivity.
The most famous model of Jacques Bourboulon has been French actress Eva Ionesco. Bourboulon is also known for always working with a Pentax.
Jacques Bourboulon is very representative of a time when the image of nude young girls was much more acceptable than today. Bourboulon was in no way an underground photograph, and his pictures were widely distributed in books or displayed in mainstream magazines such as Photo. Due to growing concerns over child pornography and abuse, this could no longer be the case at the beginning of the 21st century.
The result is that Jacques Bourboulon is no longer mainstream but that his pictures and books are actively traded among amateurs on the web. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Bourboulon [Apr 2005]
Irina Ionesco: mother and photographer
- Irina Ionesco [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
Irina Ionesco was born in Paris in 1935, the daughter of Romanian immigrants. She spent her childhood years in Constanta, Romania, at the threshold between East and West, before returning to France in 1946. Her first photographs appeared in the 1960s. Since 1970, her work has been exhibited in France, Italy, Spain, Belgium, England, Egypt, the US, Japan and Germany. Irina Ionesco lives and works in Paris. "I adore all that is excessive, dreamlike, curious. So I have adopted as my own these words by Baudelaire: 'In art, only the bizarre is beautiful.'"For Irina Ionesco, photography is a poetic medium. The pictures of female nudes collected here are witness to genuine encounters between women and, because Ionesco's daughter Eve is frequently the subject of her photography, between mother and daughter. Born in Paris, Ionesco spent her childhood years in the port city of Constanta, Romania. Deeply affected by the loss of her mother in childbirth, her photography is also the pursuit of the motif of suffering: the painful experience of the absence not only of her mother's affection, but of the memory of her image. This desire for an encounter with a mother's face is a dual one: Ionesco strives to recreate a sense of both visual recognition and affection in an ethical sense. --http://www.children-in-art.com/eva/en/irina_ionesco.html
- Eva: Eloge De Ma Fille (2004) - Irina Ionesco [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
Synopsis
Irina Ionesco is the 'Grande Dame' of French erotic photography. These photographs of her young daughter Eva Ionesco have been widely acclaimed since the 1970?s. Voted 'Woman of the Year' by Time Life Photography 1977, with over 12 books and countless international exhibitions, Ionesco's style is unique. The noted American photography critic A. D. Coleman writes in the Preface 'These images insistently demand a singular response'. Here we have Eva nude, partially clothed, and fully dressed, enacting - the self-decoration, postures, and gestures of feminine flirtation and erotic enticement.' With all Ionesco?s previous monographs out of print, EVA is the largest and definitive collection of 124 Eva photographs and is destined to become a classic. Never before in the history of photography has an artist of this magnitude photographed her child to such stunning effect. Disclaiming controversy, Ionesco explains 'The liberty I took in baring her was innocent'. Weaving threads of baroque orientalism, gothic eroticism and surrealist fantasy, these mysterious photographs bear witness to a 'dark love'as Graham Ovenden describes in the Foreword. This high quality publication by Alice Press is printing simultaneously with a Japanese edition and a lavishly bound collector?s Limited Edition presented in a pink satin clamshell box.
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