His name: Mehdi Sotos.
His exhibition: Drag The Line is held until February 20, 2025.
He presents himself like this.
I come from the suburbs of Saint-Denis in Ile de France, where my reputation has more than once exceeded borders for bad reasons. I have always felt excluded from society as a person from a city where the majority of the inhabitants remain invisible in order to give way to his basilica or his stadium in France. This is why throughout my career, I have always devoted myself to what we do not want to see. I started my work of the image in the underground at a time when tattoo, skateboarding and barbers were not fashionable. Today, all of this has become mainstream, that’s why I have been interested in an art form for some time that has not fully found its place in society. An art of the spectacle that is both political and entertaining, an art of living for these artists who cannot fully express their image to the general public without putting themselves in danger. We are obviously talking about the drag.
As hetero, I sailed in an art lgbtqia+ as a boat on a new sea. Before moving to photography, I wanted to understand these artists, their functioning, their values as well as their different emotional stages before and After a show to show them my respect and the value they have in my eyes. For this, I spent a lot of time behind the scenes before the representations, to develop my learning in the art of the drag to understand their stories and what they claim. All this allowed me to develop a very little used photographic style in the Drag world.
The characters on the Drag scene are often perceived as chimerical beings, defying standards and imagination. Women and men like never elsewhere you will meet. A kind of Freak Show that makes some salivate and for others are repugnant. These artists live the love and hatred of a society and once their transformation is completed and their character drag touching earth, they/they are observed that through the prism of the character they/they embody. As if the human who inhabits them, their weaknesses and their emotions disappeared under the make-up and the ornaments.
It is this distortion that I wanted to deconstruct through my photographic work. I am not content to capture figures, I seek to humanize these characters, to grasp the intensity of their interior emotions. I break the visual codes of the Drag: the brilliant color, the perfect smoothing of the skin, the erasure of imperfections … and stage the characters drags in a natural environment to reveal a more raw truth, the human who exists in them.
-My photographic style that is both raw and authentic reveals another vision of the drag, where beauty is not necessarily highlighted. Above all, I wish to present you an emotional and human aspect of an art of living. Demystify the fact that a character has no feelings and showing you that through the drag, hides a human being and not a character of Freak Show.
Mehdi Sotos
Mehdi Sotos: Drag The Line Chez “Olympe” until February 20, 2025
At 37 rue Hoche 93500 Pantin
@Lasototgraphy
