When Girls Photographers Are Violently Censored — Blind Journal

Time, given lengthy sufficient, typically helps us make sense of the incomprehensible. And typically it doesn’t. We strive nonetheless, with Sandra Reinflet, Kamille Lévêque Jégo and Julie Balagué. Three girls photographers who, in 2025, had been subjected to acts of fabric and symbolic vandalism. On March 11, 2025, contained in the Basilica of Saint-Denis, North of Paris, a far-right group lined Sandra Reinflet’s works — portraits of ladies who dwell in Saint-Denis — and changed them with pictures of Christian figures. During the evening of April 25–26, 2025, Kamille Lévêque Jégo’s exhibition on the NegPos gallery in Nîmes was ransacked: it staged a fictional gang of firebugs. On 6 November 2025, Julie Balagué’s work on being pregnant denial, proven as a part of the Photo Days competition, was stolen. A check model was unexpectedly put as a replacement, solely to be vandalized the next day, scored with adhesive tape. Three incidents that made headlines — and that trace at many extra, quieter violations.

A state of emergency

What strikes first shouldn’t be anger however sorrow. All three describe a second of shocked disbelief, confronted with occasions whose scale that they had not anticipated. Accustomed to engaged on delicate topics, that they had not anticipated violence of this sort. “This type of violence is a repetition of mechanisms women have already lived through: humiliation, symbolic domination, aggression,” observes Kamille Lévêque Jégo. Censorship imposes a state of emergency that’s incompatible with the lengthy rhythms of artistic work. You must react, reply, restore. And take up the blow. Sandra Reinflet recollects the messages that flooded in: “How dare you put hijabs in the Basilica of Saint-Denis?” and “When the time comes, we will remember you, collaborators of Islam, leftist scum.” Her work was shortly swallowed by political controversy: “The subject was hijacked and the far-right media ran with it. My phone rang dozens of times a day. I spent a month and a half doing nothing but answering.”

In this context, the artists turned disaster managers regardless of themselves: fielding media requests, dealing with social networks, defending the individuals that they had photographed, and sustaining — as finest they may — some type of creative exercise. In Nîmes, Kamille Lévêque Jégo selected, along with the gallery director Patrice Loubon, to reinstall the exhibition in its authentic kind. “The risk is that the incident overshadows the work itself. Seeing these images again in all their dignity was a source of pride and relief,” she explains. For Julie Balagué, the emergency was fast. She found the theft of her work two hours earlier than the opening. There was no time to assume. A textual content first defined the absence, then a failed model of the work was discovered and reinstalled collectively. As if censorship, regardless of itself, had grow to be a co-author of the piece.

Masculinist patterns

In all three instances, censorship didn’t cease at destruction: it turned a pretext. The topic itself shifted. Or relatively, was shifted. In Sandra Reinflet’s case, a piece conceived to light up particular person lives turned the stage for an identity-politics controversy. “There were three veiled women among thirty-two. That was never my subject,” she factors out. Yet the talk crystallized across the veil and faith.

This drift erased the individuals depicted, changing them with a political narrative that overwhelmed them. “They were completely instrumentalized. Nobody asked who they were,” the photographer laments. In Kamille Lévêque Jégo’s case, the violence enacted masculinist patterns: by soiling and trampling pictures of unruly girls, it displaced the topic — from an evaluation of the imaginary to a problem to the very proper of that imaginary to exist. As for Julie Balagué, the vandalism — defacing a picture coping with being pregnant denial — acted as a literal try to cover our bodies. “Someone decided that a female body had no place here,” she says.

None of the three artists claims to follow self-censorship. And but all three describe concrete changes to their follow. Sandra Reinflet places it plainly: “It’s not censoring myself, it’s being careful.” Not all the things might be proven all over the place anymore. The circumstances of show have grow to be a central query. Certain venues at the moment are dominated out — not out of resignation, however to guard the individuals photographed. This vigilance comes with higher reflection upstream: informing topics of the dangers, anticipating reactions, pondering by way of the exhibition context.

Julie Balagué additionally voices a really concrete concern: the skilled penalties. As a freelancer, she is determined by distribution networks and companions. Speaking out publicly isn’t a impartial act. She describes a grueling week, caught between robust assist and insinuations that she was “doing PR.” Censorship thus works at depth: it doesn’t solely make pictures disappear — it alters the very circumstances beneath which they’re made and flow into.

Against all this, one line of pressure holds: to maintain going. “The best response to censorship is to keep creating,” says Sandra Reinflet. The different two photographers share this resolve. But this “keep going” is not intact. It is shot by way of with a sharper political consciousness: at present, all the things is political. What censorship finally reveals shouldn’t be solely what it prevents — however what it transforms: the connection to the general public, to establishments, to the individuals photographed. The relationship to threat. And that considerations everybody. Worth noting, too, is the assist prolonged by three skilled collectives: Les Filles de la Photo, the LUX and Diagonal networks. The media, for his or her half, should additionally lead by instance. “During the filming of a programme in the chapel, certain works were taken down without my consent, including the one that had already been vandalized, and a photograph showing a woman holding a pregnancy test,” says Julie Balagué. Silent censorship is simply as severe as outright vandalism.