Les Tortures Volontaires (Voluntary Tortures)

Les Tortures Volontaires (Voluntary Tortures) reissues one of Annette Messager's earliest and most cited photographic works, a grid of appropriated and staged images cataloguing the routine pains women submit to in pursuit of beauty: waxing, corseting, plucking, dieting. It is presented with the flat, procedural tone of a medical or advertising archive.

Originally made in 1972 and republished here by Hatje Cantz in 2013, the 92-page volume is composed of loose, folded sheets bound together by a length of string and housed in a slipcase. The physical form echoes the piece's original presentation as a wall-mounted collection of images rather than a conventional bound book. The images draw on found photography, women's magazines, and advertising alongside Messager's own staged pictures, blurring the line between documentation and complicity in the practices she depicts.

Messager (b. 1943) has worked across photography, drawing, textiles, and installation since the late 1960s, frequently under invented personas, collecting, cataloguing, or physically altering images and objects associated with women's bodies. She represented France at the Venice Biennale in 2005, winning the Golden Lion for her installation "Casino."