In the series Whispers, Emmanuelle Bousquet has chosen, this time, for her role to be personified by different characters, emissaries sent to explore a critical period in her life: adolescence. Whispers, her most recent series, differs greatly from her previous photographic compilations, self-portraits where Emmanuelle exorcised her primal fears, awakening her deepest anxieties and pain, all too often suppressed and silenced, and thus unearthing an introspective and cathartic vision. 

Thereafter, the subject of adolescence naturally came into the artist’s conscious, the inspiration embodied through the forms of young women, aged 13 to 18, whose bodies seem too large for them, as in the photographs of teenagers by Rineke Dikjstra (1992). For Emmanuelle, Whispers is part of a larger body of work on femininity. This work expresses the difficulties experienced during this extreme yet eminent transformation, becoming oneself, a woman, with all that it entails, its secrets, its silences, when a young girl’s body becomes, perhaps a bit too quickly, a bit too soon, that of a woman.