My parents, or queer innocence
2025–2026 — Photographic series (ongoing)
My parents, 87 and 93, are celebrating sixty years of marriage. As always, they mark the occasion with a costume party, drawing family and friends into joyful transformations where, for one evening, everyone becomes a little other.
I photographed the behind-the-scenes of these preparations. In the intimacy of their bedroom, the living room, the bathroom, my parents get ready. Their gestures are precise and careful, carried by a meticulous focus honed over the years.
Within that attention, unexpected expressions surface: on my father’s face, a melancholy appears, then withdraws almost at once. At times, a kind of surrender passes through their bodies. Joy stays measured. More rarely, a wordless complicity arrives, and a scene invents itself without display.
I don’t claim to capture reality unguarded. I bring back a story, perhaps a legend, shaped by this bond, by my place within it, and by the shift these familiar faces bring about in me. Nothing is staged; everything happens in the spontaneity of the moment, at the distance that trust allows.
After sixty years of dressing up, something becomes clear. My father returns to his wedding dress with quiet familiarity. My mother, like a diva in an Eastern costume, forces nothing. She simply occupies her place. The extraordinary becomes ordinary; artifice has become nature.
In a world where old age so often vanishes from images, my parents remain in the frame. At 87 and 93, they refuse to fade out: they keep dressing up, staging themselves, varying their appearances. And it is there, perhaps, that the word queer comes back to me, in its earliest sense: a strangeness, a step to the side. I hear it differently then, through their innocence, tender and unsettling. It lets me see my parents as queer before the term, not as a pose, but as a way of being: cross-dressing, loosening expected identities, gently shifting the rules of propriety, with laughter running underneath.
For them, growing old is not a withdrawal, but a way of continuing to create, multiple and fully present.
