Description

Over the course of four decades, the Countess Virginia Oldoïni Castiglione went to be photographed in the same studio in Paris, posing in different tableaux to mark the moments of her life, real and imagined. A fascination with ‘La Castiglione’ led Nathalie Léger to weave together this imaginative proto-biography. Mysterious and over-exposed, adored and despised for her beauty in equal measures, Castiglione was a flamboyant aristocrat, mistress of Napoleon III and a rumoured spy. Drawing comparisons with Cindy Sherman and musing on the relationships between the likes of Louise Bourgeois and Robert Mapplethorpe, Marilyn Monroe and Bert Stern, Isabelle Huppert and Roni Horn, Léger examines the myths around icons past and present, meditates on the half-truths of portrait photography and reframes her own family history.