Liliroze

Femininity, intimacy, and beauty combine in the soulful portrayals of the female body in LiLiROZE’s portraiture. Her photos are not emblematic of the mundane moments of everyday life but rather seek soulful introspection. Their sensualness reaches into the echo chambers of the mind, into feelings and dreams. The Swiss-French photographer deliberately abandons all sharpness of detail. She favors long exposure times and natural light. These techniques give the photos a slightly blurred contour that creates a painterly texture that almost verges on impressionism.  


Color depth, flesh, and female nudes perhaps seem like distant echoes of a bygone era of painting, film, and Romantic poetry, but the photographer formidably creates her own genre with distinctive poetic characteristics. Born in Geneva in 1972, she found inspiration in the polaroid. The haptic and material nature of a polaroid picture drove her question how one might find the perfect blend of the inner and outer image. When describing her work, she says the photographs do not reveal what she sees, but what she feels. And delicately her soft characteristic blur and the silky sheen of the smoldering colors lay over the dark varnish of her images, like a sweet, intoxicating perfume.


As a child, Nathalie Roze, or LiLiROZE, was fascinated by the chemical process of analog photography after watching her father work in the darkroom. After she studied economics her passion for photography grew. In 1997, she moved to Paris and enrolled at the ENS Louis-Lumière, where she delved into the mediums of film and photography. While assisting several fashion photographers she developed her own style influenced by Sarah Moon and Paolo Roversi, with a nevertheless a distinct expression and bold visual aesthetic.


Stephan Reisner