She had her daughter, still a minor, an erotic model. At the heart of the novel “Eva” Simon Liberati, the artist was dismissed his complaint for “violation of privacy”. Portrait of a controversial woman.
The photographer Irina Ionesco, 85, has been dismissed by the courts. In early August, she had attacked the writer Simon Liberati, companion of his daughter Eva, and Stock publishing, asking that passages of his new book Eva , published Aug. 19, are removed. But who is Irina Ionesco, whose naked pictures of her pre-pubescent girl impressed the 1970s? Diving in a controversial artist sulfur universe.
Erotica or pornography?
A half-naked girl in suggestive poses and decked with accessories fetishists: the name of Irina Ionesco is marked with the seal of the scandal. From the age of four years, Eva, his daughter becomes the muse – worse, the subject – his mother, who until his twelve years the photographed every week in often scabrous situations. As an adult, it remains the youngest model who posed nude for Playboy (today sold a number of $ 500 on eBay) brought charges against her mother, finally condemned by the Court of Appeal to “unhealthy sexualization” of a “young child”. This toxic relationship, Eva Ionesco was staged in the film My Little Princess with, in the role of Irina, a whimsical and predatory Isabelle Huppert.
Of course, in full sexual revolution of the seventies, the fashion was to Lolitas. But the incriminating photographs go beyond blur David Hamilton teenagers, all suffused with a soft light. At Irina Ionesco, the atmosphere is dark, lascivious, salacious. A candlelight, white skin of his models stands out against the dark drapery and furs. Eyes and rouged mouth, trimmed with lace, jewelry, garters, his women – his daughter! – Pose in heels, with crosses and skulls
A magical world
Irina Ionesco was not always a photographer.. Born in Paris in 1930 of a musician father and a mother who abandons trapeze artist very early, she spent her childhood in Romania, with her grandmother. Fleeing the Russian occupation in 1946, she returned to Paris, becoming in turn snake dancer, contortionist, painter … In 1964 she touches her first camera. A hair inspires, and here launched in eroticism. Noticed at his exhibition at the Nikon Gallery in 1974, it is published in numerous magazines and exhibited internationally, including draws the portrait of Sylvia Kristel, film heroine Emmanuelle .
Orientalism, gypsy culture, eroticism of the Roaring Twenties: the universe is full of Irina Ionesco influences. More provocative than the “Nudes with strips” of Man Ray, but submitted that the warlike Helmut Newton, his wives have many faces. With a cap Tsarina or a wreath, the artist turns into Byzantine icons, with pagan goddesses, courtesans in brothels. “Each session, staging and conceived as a theatrical sequence integrates the woman in a dream world, which itself is legendary, multiple, invented” , she wrote in an autobiographical text, My flying carpet .
Beyond eroticism
Multiple, Irina Ionesco is too. Far from being limited to a single register, it creates still lifes then, in the 1980s, photographs of his travels in the East. In a report in Tokyo in 2004, she manages to meet Yakusas: the mafia Tokyoites accept bare ask for it, revealing in beautiful black-and-white covered their body tattoos. Between 2000 and 2012, Irina Ionesco is also a fashion photographer for Vogue, Stiletto or Givenchy. In the pages of the Japanese version of Vogue child, she signs a dreamlike series inspired Alice in Wonderland . Whether naked women or Yakuza, photographs contain a hypnotic power, expressing the ambivalence of seduction. But in the case of her little girl, magic spell is changed. His images are fascinating, often for the worse …
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