It takes a certain audacity to place a naked body before the immensity of the ocean and make a photographic series of it. Yet Caroline Deloffre’s audacity lies elsewhere: not in the nudity itself, but in the subtlety of the framing and the quality of presence she manages to capture. Her models do not pose: they face, in the deepest sense of the word — they confront something greater than themselves.

The sea, the beaches and the cliffs are far more than a backdrop in her work. They act as revealers: faced with the blue immensity and the permanence of rock, the human body finds its true dimensions. Nudity here is not a provocation but a laying bare in the literal sense — a removal of everything that protects, that masks, that allows us to tell ourselves a story about ourselves. What remains, in this face-to-face between skin and horizon, is something essential that Caroline Deloffre manages to capture with rare sensitivity.

Facing. Facing time, the moment, the benevolent welcome of a sea, a beach, a cliff, in an azure-blue ocean with a distant horizon, unfathomable, penetrating. Facing. Naked, entirely undressed. Oneself, one’s modesty, one’s virtue. Facing: turning one’s back! On the nagging everyday that unwinds its joys and torments and flows on to its own tempo. On the familiar human anthill, its conventions, its debacles, its dreams, its illusions, its dungeons. Brushing it all aside! And posing there, on the infinitesimal threshold between the simple pleasure of being and the chosen duty of appearing, before the lens of the artist Caroline Deloffre. Those you see in the photographs of the Facing series would doubtless not use these words to describe these images of themselves taken skin-deep. This unique experiment, conducted for more than a year by Caroline Deloffre, is daring: asking strangers to undress by the water, here or elsewhere, in broad daylight, and to offer their nudity to the lens… might shock. And yet, with her sincere gentleness, she wins everyone over to her project, she who is so attached to the clarity of humanity. Her unusual work, with its repetitive aesthetic that is invariably shifting in view of these anonymous men and women, alone or in couples — is this the definition of freedom? Of being facing the primal universe? Of time passing without counting? Since from every body only beauty exults, from every sea only serenity… The artist-photographer explains little, leaving full room for the feelings of the startled viewer who discovers — intrigued, captivated, amused, voyeuristic or scandalised? — this series of images, the prelude to an adventure she intends to pursue until her thirst for truth is quenched.

Catherine Maliszewski, contributor to Le Monde