Jessica Yatrofsky signs her book

The american photographer Jessica Yatrofsky has chosen the gallery to sign in Paris her book I Heart Girl, a porfolio of photographs of women, an invitation to re-examine femininity by highlighting the complexity of gender identification.

The subjects of I Heart Girl do not exhibit the expected stereotypes of women in mass media today. Each face and each body is presented by Jessica Yatrofsky through study and repetition, examining feminity with irreverence and countering the widely accepted female image of past generations.

Purposely capturing young subjects with varying degrees of “masculine” and “feminine” traits, Yatrofsky further ignores the clichés of conventional gender identifiers.

Some subjects are adorned by tattoos, symbolic of their placement in history, others with hints of counter-culture peeking through extra pierced holes and candy-colored wisps of hair. The poses are earnest and the light is revelatory. Through features once perceived as diametrically opposed; the subjects becoming representative of a facet in the current cultural landscape. It is a landscape whose breadth has extended and evolved further than ever before, but still one that is often at odds with itself.

Jessica Yatrofsky is a New York-based photographer and filmmaker. Focusing on body politics, beauty and gender, Yatrofsky’s work spans across fine art and fashion photography as well as experimental and documentary film. Her photographic work has been exhibited internationally and is part of the permanent collection with the Leslie Lohman Museum in New York City.