Artist Statement
Perrine Gaudry is a photographer and scholar whose work centers on ambiguity, transformation, and the shifting conditions under which images and identities appear. Her practice spans portraits, drag performances, landscapes, and expanded photographic forms, and is held together by a sustained interest in thresholds—visual, temporal, and conceptual—where familiar forms begin to loosen and take on new meanings.
Her drag photographs, made during live performance, follow moments of embodied transformation as they unfold, while her ongoing project Virtual 19th Century Queer Photography reworks contemporary portraits through alternative processes to imagine queer presence within the visual languages of the nineteenth century. Other photographic series, including On Liminality, explore states of transition through landscapes that verge on abstraction, where the horizon becomes a site of perceptual and emotional metamorphosis.
Gaudry’s work in Expanded Photography—accordion books, modular panels, time-based montages, and photo–text pieces—extends these concerns by altering the material and temporal architectures of the image. Through unfolding, sequencing, shifts in contrast and color, and the recomposition of fragments, she investigates how photographs behave once displaced from the single frame and how ambiguity can be rendered visible through form.
As a scholar of visual culture, queer studies, and the history of photography, Gaudry examines indeterminate or unstable representations, particularly in relation to gender and archival practices. Her photographic work has been exhibited at the Steffen Thomas Museum of Art, and she is currently a Visiting Scholar in the Department of French & Italian at Emory University.
Research Statement
Gaudry’s research examines how gender, embodiment, and visual culture are shaped through photographic practices and archival forms, from the nineteenth century to contemporary digital environments. Her dissertation, The Virtual Archives of Gender, analyzes how photography in France has contributed to constructing—and contesting—cultural understandings of gender and sexual minorities. Her current historical project traces the depiction of intersex figures in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century photography, exploring how medical discourse, popular imagery, and emerging technologies made the intersex body newly visible and contentious.
In parallel, Gaudry develops research on AI, digital archives, and ambiguity-aware annotation that extends the same concerns shaping her historical and photographic work. She designs computational and curatorial frameworks that preserve, rather than resolve, the uncertainty, plurality, and contradictions embedded in images and records. By proposing multi-assertion metadata and non-binary descriptive models, she challenges classificatory systems that flatten complexity and reimagines how digital archives might hold space for marginalized or ambiguous subjects.
Gaudry also curates History of Queer Photography – From Discrimination to Visibility, an online platform offering archival materials, historical insights, photo–text experiments, and collaborative workshop projects centered on LGBTQI representation.
A full curriculum vitae is available for download below.