When dancers and mountebanks were banned in the City of Light, while others quailed in their closets or pottered around snazzy country houses, Sarah Meunier was photo-reporting the Covid quarantine for The Best American Poetry’s “Beyond Words” section. In exclusive photos of a citizen sheltering in place, readers were able to experience Sarah’s unbreakable determination to lay bare the hidden realities of that “moment bizarre”.
Mlle Kiss is a hostess for hire. Photo © Sarah MeunierPhotographer Sarah Meunier has much more to reveal, including some girl cousins just up the road who have a taste for drag queens. A family person – no doubt acting in the same spirit that had me go spare shotgun for grampa Walter’s autumnal shoot in the black mud and rough hedge of northern Ohio and, no doubt, agreeing over a Sunday lunch – Sarah was induced to bring her camera along to places like Cirque Electrique, cabaret décadent, where the well-known cross-dresser queen Corrine plays out some of the best of contemporary Paris decadence in the best tradition of cabaret. So, even if you don’t care about Corrine’s sartorial fancies, Sarah says she recommends Cirque Electrique as especially good performance.
Sailor K loves making up. Photo © Sarah MeunierSarah’s approach has a way of getting at the flesh and blood of the people she’s photographing. She seems to want to put the on-looker face to face – subject to subject – with the person depicted rather than to use technique to depict an (esthetic) interiority or quality in a looked-at object – subject to object. I am always aware that Sarah’s people eat, drink, laugh, dance, have job someplace. So, like me or you, Sarah Meunier’s drag-queens seem to be working their way through this, our vale of tears and guffaws.
France Gaule – bills herself as a part-time local icon. Photo Sarah MeunierThe au délà du reel ethetic in the Sarah Meunier’s drag queen photos is in the light and color reference. She frames the drag queen work-a-day with exoticness by tweaking colors that bring out a 60s street placard or an advertisement in Lifemagazine. Come crowding unbidden into mind a bizarre mix of American place – empty desert, grey city – and marketing iconography – paperback potboiler covers, Winston cigarette packages, Marliyn Monroe.
A published version of Sarah Meunier’s As You Like It collection can be purchased by contacting Galerie Manjari & Partners site or from Sarah Meunier’s Instagram page.
Sarah Meunier’s work on African animals is coming up at Manjari & Partners later in February 2023.
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Author: Paul Tracy DANISON
