Céline Bodin: The Hunt

In The Hunt, Céline Bodin creates a brief encyclopedia of female hairstyles across various periods in time, within the framework of Western culture. The series reflects upon the pictorial qualities of hair: studying its materiality, its ability to convey identity, also recalling the Victorian “hair medallion”—a small, decorative keepsake made from an ornate curl of a loved one’s hair, a pre-photographic memento that draws connections between portraiture, identity, and memory. The figures appear as ornate statues, each characterized by the aesthetic associations and revisited stereotypes ofx their hairstyle. The anonymity of the images presented in The Hunt activates the mind’s associative aptitude, drawing upon one’s own fantasies and projections of sensuality, innocence, order, freedom, frivolity, and social rank. Echoing classical art, these images refer to a mystical icon rather than presenting a portrait of an individual.

Céline Bodin (born 1990, Louviers, France) is a French photographer living and working in London. She trained at the Gobelins School in Paris and in 2013 graduated with a masters degree in Photography from the London College of Communication. Purdy Hicks Gallery held her first solo exhibition in 2019. Her work has been included in several publications and exhibitions, such as fiction illustation commissionbed by The New Yorker magazine in 2019 and 2021. Her series Light of Grace was presented as part of the exhibition ‘Squaring the Circles of Confusion’ at the Royal Photographic Society, Bristol, and Scarborough Museum in 2022-23.