Fashion Magazine by Lise Sarfati: Austin, Texas

This edition of Fashion Magazine is devoted solely to the work of French photographer Lise Sarfati. In her portraiture, Sarfati dramatizes the intensities of fashionably clad adolescence in the insolently sensual creatures she encounters on the roads of America. Couching their lightly worn street elegance in moody sobriety, Sarfati presses pause on the activities in which her subjects are engaged and extracts their quintessential sensuality, to produce a type of photography that partakes of both fashion and portraiture idioms without quite belonging to either. Redolent in this respect of Alain Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad, in which the camera deliberately and continually "overgrooms" the emotional drama, Sarfati's work is likewise utterly seductive and compelling.
Lise Sarfati obtained a master's degree in Russian studies from the Sorbonne in Paris, where she was the official photographer of the Académie des Beaux-Arts. She moved to Russia in 1989 and photographed there for 10 years. She has received the Prix Niépce in Paris and the Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography in New York for her work and is a member of Magnum Photos. In recent years she has been living and working in the United States. Sarfati is represented by Yossi Milo Gallery in New York, Rose Gallery in Los Angeles and Magnum Gallery in Paris.