REGARDE
Revolutionnizing images by images
Susan is a photographer.
When her life turns upside down,
she loses control over what she captures. Haunted by violence, she hunts, scrutinizes,
and pushes her female models to the extreme.
She learns that images can kill, and turns her camera into a tool of liberation.
A film by Valérie Nagant
“ We learn as much about a society from the images that it shows us as from the ones it doesn't."
Susan Sontag
IMAGES ARE POLITICAL
Our images shape our society, our culture. And yet, they remain a point of view— one that is hegemonic. They show and normalize, while at times concealing and erasing.
The image is a pharmakon ; if it can be our poison, it can also be our cure. It holds power against the blind spots of our visual culture, a space where those who have been silenced can be made visible.
This is what Regarde (meaning Look, in french) aims to do : opening our eyes to spark transformation through image-ination.
THE PROJECT
Regarde is first and foremost a cinematic experiment, a work of fiction, a short film, set to be released at the end of 2025. It tells the story of Susan, a photographer, who experiences her camera as a lens revealing our society and its violences.
It is an attempt to challenge our visual culture — what it has done to bodies and possibilities — and to put to the test our understanding of the meaning and power of our shared images.
This creation, rooted in the desire to set our world right, also envisions broader horizons: a photographic project, encounters and discussions, perhaps a feature film, an exhibition...
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Veerle Baetens ©ValérieNagant
We live in a world ruled by images. And too often, they tell the same story. Whether through photography, cinema, advertising, or painting, they depict women as objects—ever more sexualized. They have confined women to eroticized roles and narratives in which they are not the protagonists. Their experiences are overlooked, their emotions dismissed. Our images are men's images, made by men and for men.
These images imprison our gaze—and poison us, too. They have turned women, ever younger women, and even children into objects of desire, into bodies to be used. They have romanticized rape and incest. They have granted men permission to commit violence, normalizing it so that we no longer see it for what it is.
The images we are fed shape our thoughts, legitimize certain emotions, bring some stories to life while erasing others. They construct our representations, our imaginations, our desires, and our dreams. Images wield real power over the world. They are profoundly political.
We must open our eyes and learn to decipher the images around us, to sharpen our gaze, to make it critical—so that we can better expose and challenge violence. And just as importantly, we must free our vision and create the images we have never seen, make the invisible visible, tell new stories, new realities, new voices.
AS WE NEED NEW IMAGES IN MIND
“ I thouht that if I could find the right place and the right quality of light, I could take pictures so painful that people would want to look away and in doing so, they would feel the need to step into the world these images represent and set it right. "
Delia Falconer
Regarde is a project for a feminist revolution of the image, through the image—because it is the medium chosen by its director, originally a photographer.
For over a decade, Valérie Nagant has used her camera to explore and reveal the silenced emotions and stories of women.
She delves into the history and power of images, drawing on the work of artists, thinkers, and experts who document a patriarchal visual culture while outlining the path to liberation.
ABOUT THE DIRECTOR
Valérie Nagant is a Belgian photographer. She has always focused on capturing portraits of women. In 2016, she created the project Femmes de cinéma, a photographic novel through which she already explores their intimacies and emotions.
Driven by an obsession to be as close as possible to their stories and lives, before equipping herself with a camera, it is with her lens that she tells their tales:
"I was haunted by images I didn’t want to see, those of violated bodies, as well as images I had never seen before, those of women who experience violence and express their anger and pain. And I became determined to create them: I impulsively, brutally, and disruptively immersed myself in a cathartic photographic project with incredible actresses like Veerle Baetens, Suzanne Clément, Aurora Marion, Marina Hands, Matilda May, Stefi Celma, Marie Kremer, Sophie Verbeeck, ...
They joined forces with me against long decades of visual silence, of smooth, disembodied images of women."
From the new images she creates, Valérie Nagant has heard that they are "terrifying," but for the artist, this is precisely the heart of her message: what is truly terrifying is that we have never seen them before.
Agnès Varda once said, "A woman's first feminist act is to look, to say: 'Okay, I am being looked at, but I too am looking.'" In this way, Valérie Nagant has taken up her camera to liberate her gaze, to feminist it.
And today, Regarde is born—created with the goal of feministizing our gaze, and, by extension, feministizing our culture and society.
Suzanne Clément ©ValérieNagant
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