Scarlett Coten is a french photographer who dedicates herself essentially to personal, long-term projects.

Her artistic practice explores the photographic medium in a performative way. Using the portrait to shed light on the power dynamics present between photographers and their models, Coten, staging the photograph, pays attention to the choice of models and the setting. While seemingly naturalist, paying tribute to documentary photography, her photographs are derived from an fabricated moment and are realised with her subjects as a collaboration. This deliberately personal approach, blurring fact and fiction, provokes a troubling truth, that of an authentic and yet totally staged encounter.

Since 2012, by inviting men to pose for her, the artist confronts the socially constructed norms surrounding both gender and masculinity, otherness and vulnerability. Her work exploring the various nuances of contemporary masculinity raises questions about art, power, gender and identity.