Beginning with her groundbreaking work La Vie Nouvelle/The New Life (2003), French native, Lise Sarfati, has realized six important series of photographs by visiting and working within the United States. Her most recent bodies of work, On Hollywood and SHE, were created in Los Angeles and the Bay Area, respectively. Both series are, like much of Sarfati's work, research into women's identities and the construction of feminine types. The artist is highly attuned to the ways in which her female subjects are attempting to construct their identities and how they choose to reveal their characters to those around them. The artist is interested in documenting the intersection between the created, fictional caricature of femininity and what is natural and self-evident.
On Hollywood includes photographs shot on and around Hollywood's urban stream over the course of 2009 and 2010. In these images, the sharp focus is on the dimension of the landscape in its most ordinary manifestations; empty sidewalks, cluttered storefronts, parking lots and cars. Hollywood is at once an iconic American setting populated by women who believe in bygone realities, as well as a zone of the universal and mundane occupied by women living on the margins. Sarfati describes the women she photographs as "toys of strange and terrible fates they are aware of but which they never seem to achieve any control over". The underlying theme of these pictures is thus, the way these women choose to project themselves and the tension between their illusions and life's actualities in modern day Los Angeles.
