L'Alsafricaine (Eric Sembach, 2018)
L'Alsafricaine is the first and best known work in my series Les Alsaciennes on which I worked between 2000 and 2018. This collection includes fourteen photos of pretty girls as quirky as they are exotic and a hundred drawings of pin-ups with extravagant headdresses. The Alsafrican has become an icon in Alsace, where she has been exhibited alongside original images by Hansi and Ungerer, among others.
But this red-capped Peul beauty is above all a star on social networks, where she gets hundreds of likes every time I repost her on the Alsatian women's Facebook page, which has some 10,000 subscribers. Available for free download, the little tribe of Alsatians has travelled to over 130 countries around the world.
Many Alsatians have seen the first trendy, glamorous and rock'n'roll images of their region. I am often told that they have de-ringardized Alsace. The people here have made them their own. In fact, it was not me but the public who christened my black pearl the Alsafricaine. Needless to say, the first reception was epic and earned me insults and even death threats at the time! Tomi Ungerer had already drawn black women with headdresses before me but he never sought beauty in the representation of his female characters. He was systematically derisive in this respect, whereas I remain religiously in the first degree.
My approach is closer to that of Oliveiro Toscani, who proposes very polished images where it is the meaning and not the form that shocks. Like, for example, his kiss of a priest and a nun for Benetton. I am not a photographer but an illustrator. I have recourse to the complicity of a portrait painter friend, in this case François Nussbaumer, when one of my images gains in terms of effect produced, to resort to the superior realism of photography. The shock of its meaning is greater. In this sense, I like to think that if my Alsafrican gives a fat racist a hard-on, then I will have produced an image with a reason other than aesthetic to exist. Because it will work to advance mentalities. It's harder to criticise what makes you hard.