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Camille Ropert : Limnées - les nymphes des eaux douces
at La Suite du Huit, as a part of Photo Days Paris
Exhibition from 5 November to 15 December 2025
Opening on 5 November 2025
Visits by appointment only (by email or telephone, see bottom of page).
In the very heart of a lake, nymphs rise up from the depths.
Called Limnées, these women can no longer bear the roles that have been assigned to them. They are trying to break free from them.
My first photographic experiments in lakes bring to mind the imagery of nymphs. In Renaissance and Pre-Raphaelite painting, they embody an allegorical idea (alongside goddesses and undines) and project a fantasy that mingles sensuality, desire and eroticism on the one hand, and purity, virginity and veneration on the other.
The community of painters, predominantly male, imposes a one-sided vision, a gaze directed only at what fascinates them: a woman’s beauty and the desire she arouses. The nymphs of John Waterhouse, William Bouguereau or Cavalier d’Arpino are fragile, dependent, passive, submissive and destined for male pleasure.
This legacy has never truly disappeared from our collective imagination. It rubs off on us.
Limnées is defined as an attempt to reclaim the gaze. I draw on the classical aesthetic codes of the great painters while adopting a female gaze.
The body as object becomes a body as subject. It is a thinking, acting body. I depict it as embodied, endowed with emotions and intentions. I strive to restore to the body its vitality, its uniqueness, its multiplicity and its complexity.
For Limnées, I choose not to select the people I photograph.
They all contacted me in response to public calls for participants (posters in streets and shops, posts on social media).
I formulate a single requirement: that they identify with the female gender. Beyond that, I consider that each of them has the right to experience being a nymph.
These people do not know one another on the very morning of the shoot. And yet a bond and a force, whose origin I cannot quite name, bring them together and unite them. Before going into the water, we talk about their reasons for taking part in the project. I observe that, in seeking to free themselves from their constraints, they all pass through ambivalent states: struggles, suffering, loss of identity, hopes or moments of calm.
I stage these transformations and attempt to capture their evolving, unfinished substance. These characteristics give the project a documentary dimension.
About the artiste :
Camille Ropert is a photographer and filmmaker. Her work is rooted in a documentary practice, in both photography and cinema, which she sometimes extends through staged compositions. She explores the connections between identity, body, and territory, questioning how personal, cultural, and historical inheritances shape the present. Specializing in underwater imagery, she uses water as a space for experimentation and distance — a place where forms and memories are reconfigured.
Informed by feminist and decolonial thought, her practice examines the structures of power and the narratives that shape how we see and think. Through her projects, Camille Ropert seeks to challenge established frameworks and open spaces for reflection on the norms and imaginaries that define our societies.
Access & Reservations :
27 rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau · Paris 1st
3rd floor
access by reservation only on +33 (0) 6 82 04 39 60 or by writing to julia@galeriehuitarles.com
open every day 11am–6pm (except Tuesday