Femmes du Brésil

'For six years, I travelled the five continents in the course of over fifteen voyages to produce portraits of women. Singular women, considered as autonomous beings outside of their ethnic, religious or national backgrounds. The title Femmes du monde was appropriate for the work published in 2007, which gathered all of these voyages in two volumes.

Yet despite the thickness of this publication, it left me with a feeling of frustration, for throughout its preparation, I faced decisions on excluding certain portraits rather than others, and for every one that was kept, I had to make a drastic selection from the dozens of drawings, paintings and photographs that these portraits inspired me.

I consoled myself with the idea of dedicating a specific work to each of these voyages, and to kick off this collection, I chose my Brazilian encounters in 2004.

The hazy title Femmes du monde suited the first publication which covered my fifteen voyages on the five continents. I incidentally preceded this title with the first name of my daughter, Zoé – Zoé-Zoé, Femmes du monde – to indicate that it wasn’t about all women, nor the whole world, but a personal work. Following this logic, it wasn’t possible for this particular work to be titled Femmes du Brésil (Women of Brazil).

For here, as elsewhere, I was presenting the portraits of women whose paths I crossed, driven by an entirely personal, and thus perfectly subjective curiosity, while following a random itinerary in a tiny part of this country-continent.

I finally adopted the title Women full stop, in the area’s most widely spoken language, namely Portuguese for this first volume in the collection – a title which stands whatever the languages into which this publication will be translated.'

Titouan Lamazou