Lila Neutre

About Lila Neutre

France. 1989.

Lila Neutre is a photographer. She is the first person to have obtained a PhD from the École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie d’Arles in partnership with Aix-Marseille Université. Her thesis, entitled “Sculpter le soi: Le corps social comme dispositif de résistance, l’apparence comme poétique de survie” (Sculpting the self: The social body as a mechanism for resistance, appearance as the poetry of survival) explores the cult of images, beauty, the multiplication of identities or style, as a symbol of struggle or rallying, reflecting deep social changes. While her visual vocabulary refers to fashion photography and pop culture, her work more widely questions the concepts of identity and self-expression in contemporary societies, and dialectics between the photographer and the photographed. She is a teacher at Parsons Paris – The New School, and also acts as a coordinator for the graduate research programme at the ENSP in Arles. She has produced exhibitions in France and abroad, notably at the Institut Français du Kansaï in Kyoto (2014, Japan), the Agnès b gallery in Paris (2017, France), the Gourvennec Ogor gallery in Marseille (2017, France). In 2018 she was the winner of the Bourse du Talent, or Scholarship of talent.