French artist & photographer Irina Ionesco is more well known for her controversial photography of her erotic photography and most controversially for using her pre-pubescent daughter Eva as a model. She fought court battles with Eva for the rest of her life, which took the center stage of French tabloids for over 40 years. Nonetheless, Irina Ionesco’s overall body of photography & painting work has been an inspiration to a lot of artists.
Irina has been photographing her daughter Eva since she was 4, in erotic poses like those of adult models posing for Playboy. Eva’s pictures were later published as a series of Irina’s work “Lolita” & included provocative images till she was 12 years old. Eva was the youngest girl ever to feature in Italian Playboy magazine when she was just 11 in 1976.
My mother made nude photos of me which were sometimes impossible to show to anyone. My mother and I now only speak through our lawyers. It’s like a Greek tragedy.
Eva Ionesco about Irina
The controversy was finally settled in court, with a Paris court in 2014 banning Irina Ionesco from “exhibiting, selling or transmitting” her images without her consent, and ordered Irina to pay €70,000 in damages.
Irina had a very traumatic childhood, struggled with father-daughter incest, that probably illed her to expose her own one & only daughter Eva to pose nude while she was a preteen for various fashion photographers like Jacques Bourboulon & be published in magazines like the the cover of Der Spiegel, Spanish edition of Playboy & Penthouse, in adult poses.
Irina was born in Paris. Her father was a violinist & her mother a trapeze artist. However Ionesco was abandoned at age 4 & raised by her grandmother & uncles in Romania. Although she aspired to be a dancer, she ended up working as a contortionist in the circus from the age 15 to 22, working with large boas, & traveling with the circus party across Europe, Africa and the Middle East.
I like artificial paradises, the magic of false luxury, that which one invents, which one creates through the play of multiple imaginary looking glasses. Thus, I have been baptized ‘The Rag Queen,’ maker of good and bad adventures. In my imaginary caravan, there is a cupboard full of decorations, tissues, trinkets, feathers and birds, lace and silk fragments of yore, found through countless bargaining in the flea markets of Paris, London or New York; objects precious and illusory, which, reinvented, become the supreme luxuries of a Thousand and One Nights.
Irina Ionesco
Her photography work started quite late in life, photographing mostly her friends & children of her friends. She worked mostly with her Nikon & her dark style worked extremely well with pulling & pushing films from 400 – 800 ASA, using candles for lighting & fashioning her models with cabaret costumes.
Irina’s fashion & documentary work is fascinating, with high contrast, often rich black tones, flamboyant in designs, somber & dark in concepts. In many critic circles though, she has left an indelible mark as an erotic photographer who borderlined on abusing her daughter, and her photography criticized as trashy & senseless, completely ignoring her unique perspective on composition & her blatant fascination for authenticity & originality.
Her pictures are in the showcased in the Tucson Museum of Art, the Bates Museum of Art and the Hood Museum of Art of Dartmouth. They have also been exhibited at art museums in France, Germany, Belgium and Switzerland. Irina Ionesco has published numerous books featuring her works. In 2004 she published a memoir, “L’oeil de la poupée / The eye of the doll”.