Rayon Vert

Senta Simond's debut photobook gathers close, unstylized portraits of young women from the Swiss photographer's own social circle, made as a deliberate counter to commercial media's packaging of youth and femininity.

The title borrows from the optical phenomenon of the green flash and from Eric Rohmer's 1986 film of the same name. Simond cites both as touchstones for a way of seeing that resists easy explanation. Photographing women between twenty and thirty, she strips away styling and decorative artifice, working instead in close crops of hair, skin and gesture. The result reads as a quiet argument against a patriarchal vision of beauty. She originally self-published the project in a run of sixteen copies; it was shortlisted for the Unseen Dummy Award and the Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards in 2017 before Kominek issued this 100-page hardcover edition, limited to 500 copies, in 2018.

Simond, born in Geneva, studied at the Ecole Cantonale d'Art de Lausanne (ECAL). She has continued to work in portraiture and the female body since Rayon Vert, including the related project Anaesthesia. The book established her as one of a generation of European photographers reworking the language of the studio portrait from outside a commercial frame.