Temporary exhibition - "Free Women" New York Sexy - Liberated Women in Black and White
Updated on 10 October 2026
Here we are in the second week of our cycle, the one where we leave the tame shores for something bolder. It is time for the Free Women series. It is a creative space I particularly love because it lets me work the body in a sculptural and symbolic way. Here, the nude becomes graphic, carrying meaning and strength. It is another facet of my work, more direct, which I am delighted to share with you today..
NEW YORK SEXYLiberated Women in Black and White |
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New York Sexy - Liberated Women in Black and White
This week, the Free Women room hosts New York Sexy. Women in black and white, sexy chic and glamorous, who take up all the space in the frame. I gathered these photos because they shared a family resemblance: a confidence in the body, an evening in the eyes.
You know my archive. More than ten years of studio, thousands of images, series very different from one another. Going back through it, some photos answered one another from one session to the next. Different women, different years, and yet the same bearing. I have gathered them here.
New York is the name I gave to that bearing. The big city, the evening, the woman who steps out and knows what she is worth. The word ‘sexy’ is in the title because desire is in the images. I own that. The word ‘chic’ comes right after, because the outfit holds.
Choosing black and white
Black and white takes away colour and keeps the essential: light, form, skin, the matter of a fabric. With colour, the eye lets itself be distracted. In black and white, it goes straight to the body and the face.
I was a sculptor for four years in Guadeloupe. I still look at a body as a volume: a shoulder, a hip, the arc of a back, the line of a leg. Black and white gives me that way of looking back. It turns every photo into a bas-relief, with its hollows and its solids.
Retouching plays a central role here. I was a Photoshop graphic designer from the early days, and I know what a contrast curve changes in an image. In black and white, everything is decided in the blacks: how far to push them, where to keep detail, where to let the white burst out on a skin. A photo can turn hard or soft depending on a few settings. For this series, I looked for deep blacks and frank whites, with enough substance between them for the skin to stay alive.
Sexy chic
Sexy chic, for me, comes down to a balance. Desire is there, frank, with no detour. And the woman keeps the upper hand. A garment covers just enough for the eye to look for the rest. A pose says ‘look at me’ and, in the same gesture, fixes the distance.
This is what places this series in the Free Women room. The women of New York Sexy hold the image. They look at the lens or ignore it, and either way, they decide. The body becomes a presence, a way of occupying space. I have photographed the feminine since 2014, and these images are among those where I effaced myself the most behind the camera. My job was to set the light and wait for the right moment.
Glamour often has a bad reputation; people think it is smooth. The glamour I look for has grain and character. It keeps the charm of the great black-and-white fashion photographs, and it adds what fashion often removes: a real woman, with her own desire.
A quiet power
In sorting these photos, I kept the ones that had poise. No cheap effects, no forced poses. A woman, a studio light, a backdrop, and this assurance that comes through the lens. The power of these images comes from calm. They don’t need to shout to be looked at.
The grouping also has an effect I like: seen together, these women form a gallery of characters. Each carries her own version of chic, her own version of desire. You move from one to the next the way you walk up an avenue in the evening, passing silhouettes that each have their own story.
New York Sexy is open this week in the Free Women room, with the three other current exhibitions. The €19 ticket opens all four rooms to you for 7 days. Members of the Patrons’ Circle have access to them, as to the whole Reserve. Come in. The lights are on.
To see this week’s exhibitions or all of my work, here are the options:
 The temporary exhibitions |  The Reserve the Patrons’ Circle | |
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This graphic exploration is over for this week, but the month is far from finished. In seven days, we will slip into something more muted and more tactile. Get ready for the Embodied Intimacies series, where we will set the staging aside to move closer to the skin and the senses. See you next week!
Yohann
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