Plein Soleil

The photography by Anais Boileau takes a humorous glimpse at a community of golden-skinned women in the South of France, as they lounge in the omnipresent sun.

These images are from French photographer Anais Boileau’s series “Plein Soleil” (:full of sun). 

“The work takes a humorous glimpse at a community of golden-skinned women in the South of France, as they lounge in the omnipresent sun. These characters can be found along the coast of the seaside towns marked by bright and colorful Latin architecture. I tried to evoke a familiarity between the portraits of these women with architectural structures that mark the landscape, placing them side by side to create a sort of diptych. There is a game of temporality between the women and the architecture, both being modelled and framed in the same way by the sun light.

These portraits also represent the kind of happy idleness that exist in the South.

I tried to approach the subject in a frivolous and tender way; women in constant dialogue with their own images.  Lost behind their sunglasses, accessories, women that are distant, pensive, absorbed by the sun. We never see their eyes with their solarium glasses and that make them impersonal. They are, in a way, self destructive, with their overexposure and excessive tanning under the brutal, violent rays of the sun. 

Floating between documentary and fiction, the portraits of this matriarchal community, reveal a desire for exoticism.

There is a dimension of artificiality and something false that lies beneath it all. There is a sense that the bodies that are exposed are refined and polished, but that all of this is just a world of appearance, of surfaces. “

-Anais Boleau

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Anaïs Boileau is a French photographer born in 1992 in Nîmes. She currently studies photography at ECAL in Lausanne, Switzerland.

These photos were from her final year project at ECAL.

See more of her work here.