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There’s something captivating about Romy Alizée’s gaze: The way she looks into the camera, her dark short hair curling at the roots, and her effortless expression. She looks at you with confidence and assurance, as she bends a man over her knee, her hand caught in mid-air as she let’s the viewer know that he is the submissive—and she is the empress.
Alizée’s work is a guttural reaction to fashion and erotica. In her teens, she grew up interested in gothic fashion and culture as well as alternative modeling. “Those women are so powerful. I want to be like them,” she remembers thinking. Gothic fashion highlights otherness—black lipstick, bondage, leather—and in a way, Alizée’s world is dark. It’s mysterious, her sets are obscurely simple. They could be happening anywhere, in any bedroom.
Gothic fashion is closely tied to BDSM and we see these small influences throughout the artist’s work. While it isn’t overpopulated with sex toys, chains, or latex, a gag ball or spanking scene are present which create alluring and playful results. Gothic subculture also questions gender roles and celebrates androgyny. In these photographs, the woman is receiving head and the man is giving it—reversing popular stereotypes of women in x-rated images.
Her career in art began at age 21, when she moved to Paris and began working as a model, posing for photographers like Laurent Benaim, Anders Petersen and the late Ren Hang. However, a sexual assault during a gig left her yearning for escape from the business. Moreover, at the time, she recalls her “vision of nudity was really far” from what she wanted to be “doing as a model.”
She found herself skipping meals before photoshoots, and her lack of confidence grew to be an unhealthy way of life. “I realized quite young there was something about my body, and later my sexuality, that I was not controlling. I had so much hate for my body and I was so obsessed with it at the same time. I could spend hours looking at my reflection in the mirror. I guess I was trying to get closer to my inner self.”
“I have met a few wonderful photographers who pushed me to be more confident. It’s a concordance of things that led me to shoot my own pictures,” she explains. So she took her trauma and obstacles and used it as inspiration, shooting photographs of her friends and herself.
Alizée felt empowered when she took control of the image, especially during self portraits. It gave her the ability to be the woman that she wanted to be, “far from any male gaze.” In a very dominating image, she is sitting on top of a person, with her legs spread, and utilizing them as a chair. The role of power is switched as Alizée appears confident as she looks into the camera. Looking at the image, the human limbs beneath are somewhat invisible. She is the subject and he is just the object—a human chair that, without closer inspection, could be mistaken for any other piece of furniture. And that’s what’s so surprising about Alizée’s work: It’s obviously overtly erotic, highly sensual and x-rated, but we wouldn’t group these images with the work found on websites like Pornhub.
Another way that her portraits differ from pornography is in her color choice. According to the artist, the lack of color makes it “provocative, punk, vintage, and raw at the same time.” A woman being pleasured on a bed is pornographic, yes, but the images don’t seem studio-lit or overly saturated. She makes the images appear like late-night snapshots—the sort of images you may find in a shoebox tucked underneath a bed—that have a level of intimacy beyond other X-rated fare.
The expressions on her subjects faces should be noted too. In traditional pornographic images, a woman mid-cunnilingus would be mid-orgasm, or captured with their mouth agape, eyes rolling back, euphoria on their mind. But seeing the model control her submissive, the faceless figure in the image, the viewer can’t help but crack a smile. He’s smothered between her legs and she can’t even bother herself in performing for the camera, in faking some sort of pleasure. She is the queen of the camera, the viewer, the model and creator.
Alizée says she’s always been obsessed by sexuality, especially because France is late on gender equality .“Men are told to express their desire through dominance,” she explains. In France there is a 25 percent gender pay gap, and a woman dies every three days from abuse. While President Emmanuel Macron admits the country is “sick with sexism,” her work focuses on the details built by a patriarchal society and how they control women’s bodies as a commodity.
“In my pictures women are queens,” explains Alizée. She empowers her models to express their deepest, darkest sexual fantasies. She tries to ensure there is no judgement between the photographer and the model on set, but a free zone to be their most natural sexual self. When Alizée is the subject, she begins by imagining herself on stage in front of the camera. She’s creating a character for the viewer. The photographer removes the expectation that the woman is consumed, absorbed, and commodified. Instead, her images reveal a modern woman that is dominant and free.
“I get my inspiration from women’s anger, hunger, and the complexity of today’s relationships [in modern society],” she concludes. And all of those layers are on display in her debut book, FURIE, out now.