Friendship is a Flower - a series by Juana Wein

“The first time I saw them I immediately felt something.” tells us Paris based photographer and director Juana Wein about her new series starring french actress Angèle Metzger, performer Paloma Vauthier and writer Fanny Vauthier. “We were on the street, the rain was falling hard so they invited me to join them at their place. I don’t have a sister: my friends had always been sisters and that’s how I imagine sisterhood is like.” she continues. “We entered the house, we went up to the room to get changed, all of our clothes were wet. We put on the music, we danced. They took me to the basement and played for me: a concert just for my camera and myself. Then the rain stopped, the sun came out and we went outside.”

We asked them all what friendship means to them:

“Like a story about the collective love of three sisters, these photographs propose to draw a horizon on the deep bonds of an absolute love. As if a look, a gesture, a smile, were the sign of a sensitive knowledge built up by thousands of moments. As if the poetic upsurge of feminine love produced an unprecedented event: art.”

PALOMA:

“For me, friendship is something that can be found only very rarely, but when it explodes it must be cultivated and protected. For me friendship is a flower, a fruit tree: it germinates, develops, takes root, grows, and it is followed by the flowering inside the pollination of life”

FANNY:

“It all started when I realised that my sister was my best friend and then when my best friend became my sister… everything intertwined, each one complemented the other… and I like to contemplate the fragile unity that we form… like something that carries us towards a reassuring elsewhere…”

ANGÈLE:

“I was raised in a family of boys.

I remember when my youngest brother was in my mother’s belly, I was wishing him to be a boy because I was scared that having a sister would mean being compared to her all the time: “she is prettier but the other one is smarter”

I was nine and already conscious that girls are more likely to be compared.

But what I didn’t know was that this attitude towards sisters doesn’t systematically create division and jealousy: it can also unify. This is what I’ve seen in Fanny and Paloma’s relation: their individual beauty seems to work for the beauty of their sisterhood and in return the power of their sisterhood highlights their own beauty.

I am lucky because I’ve crossed their road and they have taken me with them on this trip.

Now when we meet people we can see in their eyes that for them, we are sisters.”