The photographic series Emma is inspired from Gustave Flaubert‘s text, Madame Bovary (1856) where the great power of literature acts as an instrument of symbolic mediation of desire.

Emma on the stereotypes of romantic literature, clashes with the emptiness, the greyness and the boredom of everyday existence, which leads her to commit adultery as a desperate way of escape, until the catastrophe of the final suicide, due to the debts incurred to satisfy her desires for luxury.

The reader will certainly enjoy the staging of a conflict that brings repressed or repressed psychic contents to the surface, an eloquent warning about the fate of attempts to escape from reality.

Flaubert makes us sympathise with Emma, with her dissatisfaction, and yet he also makes us distance ourselves from her, shows us the wound and, not knowing or perhaps not even wanting to propose a cure, throws salt on it.

Model: Ariane Heloise Hughes