June 5, 2025 |
There’s a moment – somewhere between instinct and precision, intimacy and confrontation – that defines the work of photographer Donna Trope. Now, for the first time in France, that moment is frozen, unfiltered and illuminated, across the walls of Carole Lambert gallery in Paris. Opening tomorrow, June 6, and running until August 30, Polaroids presents an exclusive selection of Trope’s previously unseen instant photos – fragments of process and imperfection that reveal the spine of her artistic vision.
A Los Angeles native trained in London, Trope is a self-taught force who has reshaped the visual lexicon of fashion and beauty since the 1980s. At a time when glossy, airbrushed perfection reigned supreme, her work dared to show beauty with teeth – and a touch of eroticism. Whether through the pages of Vogue, Dazed, Harper’s Bazaar, or, of course, 10 Magazine (Trope has been a prolific contributor since our early days) her photography – which felt seductive yet strangely unnerving whilst remaining both emotionally exposing and defiantly unfiltered – spoke to a new visual language, one that redefined how femininity, desire and power could be portrayed.
But behind every “final” image lies the real story: more than 25,000 Polaroids (“mistakes”) taken throughout Trope’s career – shot compulsively, instinctively and with obsessive care before the digital age. They were never meant to be seen. As Trope herself puts it, “Originally the rejects, these Polaroids show my M.O. of reaching the final image. The holy grail, if you will, of the task. The task being; go through the motions to explain visually what’s in my thoughts.” And yet, with time, those so-called “mistakes” revealed their own truth: a more honest, vulnerable and surprisingly powerful archive of the many, many shoots she found herself on. “Sometimes even your mistakes are something to love. A perfect image is not quite as interesting as the imperfect one,” she says.
The idea to display them came not from a need to perfect, but from a desire to show the journey. “Years later,” Trope says, “the final image is no longer the perfection I thought it would be. On the contrary, to see my emotion as I climbed toward perfection is to see it all.”
Curated in collaboration with Fany Dupêchez, Polaroids is the result of instinctual selection – a visual conversation between two women who share a deep sensitivity to the nuances of female identity and self-presentation. “Each image,” the gallery notes in a press release, “opens a vivid dialogue between two visual languages, two powerful visions of female emancipation – intimate, electric and fiercely contemporary.”
The show’s origins trace back to Carole Lambert’s first encounter with Trope’s work in 2000 when she came across a bold, irreverent series of portraits in Vogue. The impact was immediate. Drawn to Trope’s unapologetic aesthetic, she began collecting her work through then-rising gallerist Kamel Mennour. Two decades later, their creative relationship culminates in this debut exhibition.
For Trope, the themes that define her career – beauty, illusion, self-image – remain as urgent as ever. “As a woman, and as an artist, I am into my reflection [and] I have the power to change the illusion,” she says. “Women do not like to admit to being obsessed or vain. We act as if it just happened. [But] I like to question and break the mystique… It’s satisfying to unearth the code of beauty. It’s an enigma and will always remain a mystery.”
Shot pre-digital age, Trope’s Polaroids were a technical necessity but evolved into something deeper – a diary of her own creative problem-solving. “The Polaroids represented my thought process in real time,” she explains. “From raw beginning to perfect ending and everything in between.” In each frame, there’s tension and truth – a visual echo of the questions Trope has posed for decades about control, vulnerability and the stories we tell with our bodies.
The images, awash with grainy textures, overexposed lighting and instinctive framing pepper the gallery like snippets of memory caught mid-thought. Their beautifully grotesque, psychosexual energy injecting viewers with a charged sense of unease and intimacy. A glimpse inside the machine behind the myth, Polaroids is Donna Trope, unfiltered, unplugged and unapologetically exposed.
Find out more here. Photography courtesy of Carole Lambert.
