Let’s paint a portrait of the portrait artist. Sonia Sieff casts the silhouette of a biker, fearless and free like those women reporters of the 1970s surveying the battlefield, looking like one of Simone de Beauvoir’s dreams made flesh. For this type of woman—women with eyepieces and darkrooms, filmmakers, art photographers—Sonia possesses a high degree of duality. She’s able to switch spontaneously between masculinity at work and femininity in representation. When we watch her evolving behind the lens, we see that femininity isn’t just a mood, a retractable mode like a cat’s claws, receding into the shadows. According to Sonia, women photographers are able to recognize each other but that doesn’t mean they’re going to sleep together. While at work, Sonia’s androgyny is striking, and not because, deep down, she’s more boy than girl. She’s just a photographer. Subjects don’t have a gender.

She wanted to be a writer. If her father passed on to her the taste for an art form, it was for literature. Jeanloup Sieff read a lot: Proust, Cioran, Perec, René Char. In the family library, novels and poetry crowded out the photography books. Sonia says that her father had a literary rapport to all things; for him, the verb preceded the image. “He spoke perfectly,” she says. “I admired him for that.” In 1975, Jeanloup Sieff took a portrait of the writer Romain Gary. A long correspondence ensued between the two. The photographer filled countless little black notebooks. His daughter speaks of him as a closeted writer. She always saw him reading and writing.