Esther Sabetpour s’est réveillée dans une unité de soin intensif, son corps brûlé et démantibulé. La seule chose dont elle se souvenait, c’est d’avoir été en boîte. Dans le cadre de sa série Recovery, elle prend des photos de son corps et des cicatrices écarlates qu’elle a reçues. C’est cru et très beau.
Just a few months before her ill-fated trip, Sabetpour — who juggles wedding photography with art projects — had begun work on a new set of images for an exhibition. Her subject was herself: her naked body. “I’d always been interested in self-image,” she says, “in ideas of identity and in the way women see their own bodies, and so often see the shortcomings rather than the beauty.”
Now, she realised, her horrendous injuries meant she could explore these ideas in a whole new way. “This time, the body I’d be photographing would be scarred and red. Of course, back then, when I thought my body didn’t look perfect, it absolutely was. Inevitably I look at those first pictures from before the accident and I think, ‘What was I worrying about?’ My body was beautiful.”