shashasha

This re-release of Maude Arsenault’s debut photobook “Entangled,” originally published in 2020, features the same design as the original book with an upgraded binding and printed on a special Japanese wood-free paper.

Maude Arsenault, who has built a successful career as a fashion photographer, opens her book with a quote by Virginia Woolf: “Growing up is losing some illusions in order to acquire other.” In “Entangled” – which is informed by a decision to “question my role and influence in the transmission of models of femininity” – Arsenault presents images of (female) body parts, nature, and private spaces, mostly in fragmented or even abstracted compositions. The names of (and Arsenault's relationships to) the girls and women depicted are left unspecified. Her quiet, well-observed, almost languorous photographs - a girl's freckled arm, the exterior of a pink beach house, two stacked chairs, the shadow of a tree branch on a wall, a portrait of a girl - carefully sense new, different modes and identities of femininity, perhaps not only for Arsenault's three daughters, but also for herself in her role as a woman and mother.

“When speaking about Entangled, Arsenault invokes the French word carcan – meaning ‘ploy,’ or ‘ambush,’ or ‘ideological trap’ – to explain the underlying motivation for making the spare and evocative pictures in this debut monograph. By which she means that becoming an adult and a parent have given her distance and perspective on the cultural demands made on the bodies and societal roles of young women, and particularly on life choices which have been constricted or even foreordained. Arsenault calls the work ‘a poem, an ode, a shout out,’ and one senses that the quiet power of the book lies in contradictions still unresolved even as the author gains in experience and independence. ‘I feel often trapped in the person I have been trying to be my entire life,’ she says in a touching and revealing statement, one that perfectly echoes the finely calibrated tensions and the tentative triumphs evoked in these pages. ‘Now I stand, shaky but alive, looking away at my world as a female with the best possible hope.’”
― from the publisher’s description