Irina Ionesco’s images appeal mostly because of a painterly, imaginative, avant-garde nature of the costumes, makeup & a stark, hard exposure pattern that makes the pictures surreal. She is. afterall, a painter who later took to photography.
The reason Irina Ionesco is more well known today is not for her direct approach to her subject & her nude photography but for featuring her pre-pubescent daughter as a model for many of her erotic photography. Just like her overall approach, here too, she is direct with the sexuality of the subject, although there are numerous images where nudity is complemented with elaborate & ornate props, costumes & make-ups.
Later on her relationship with her daughter Eva Ionesco, who later became an actress & director, became strained & they had the fatal fallout over the rights over her pictures. Eva seems to naturally understand the camera. Later she went on with her acting career with the debut in the Roman Polanski film “The Tenant,”
Irina Ionesco’s first solo exhibition was in the Nikon Gallery in Paris in 1974, featuring mostly her radical makeups from her fashion photography portfolios. Some of her more famous collected arts are Liliacées Langoureuses aux Parfums d’Arabie (1974), Elle-Même (1996) & her photography book Temple Aux Miroirs (Temple of Mirrors).
Irina Ionesco’s artists statement:
Decadent poetry, symbolist paintings, Hollywood films, Greek tragedies, kitsch sublimated or the sublime consecrated. 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
Just like with any artist trying to break through the captive & oppressive feeling of conventional artwork, Irina Ionesco’s photographs, especially I would think her dark, direct approach to nudity has been vocalised by art critics as “trashy” and “distasteful”. While anyone who finds beauty in art, reality & nature will find essence, those who cannot think beyond will complain!