Photography and Identity: Dominique Lambert by Stéphanie Solinas

Abstract

The possibility to materialize a “other” identity compared to the daily one, has been offered by photography since its beginnings.  Reinterpreting the same methods used for the official photographic portrait, in many, amateurs or professional artists, were able to model perfectly credible alter egos as recorded. From Eugène Disdéri's customers to Cindy Sherman, passing through Marcel Duchamp and Claude Cahun, one can witness a genesis of imaginary individuals objectified by photography. In the contemporary scene, an artist who has embraced this "identity poetics" in an organic way is the French Stéphanie Solinas, with the work Dominique Lambert (2004-10). In this work, shown in several versions including the book format and the installation, Solinas investigates the role of the photographic portrait in the process of building an identity. After having contacted each Dominique Lambert of France asking to fill out a questionnaire and send their passport photo, she has some descriptive profiles drawn up from which she obtains small drawn portraits, in turn translated into digital images. Finally, the artist creates photographic portraits of real people starting the elaboration from the digital faces, thus obtaining a set of identities completely different from the original ones, some virtual Dominique Lambert, but equally plausible because they are certified by photography, a key element and seal of the whole aesthetic operation.