Elsa & JohannaBeyond the shadows

“The self-portrait series Beyond the shadows, made between 2018 and 2019 in Calgary, Canada, by Elsa Parra and Johanna Benaïnous connects their self-fictional creative process, their love for directing and their strong taste for cinema.
The two artists carried out this project in total immersion for a month. From the styling to the location scouting, from the props to the characters, they elaborate their stagings in complete intimacy and autonomy. The city’s suburban neighbourhoods and the hilly landscapes of its surroundings were a vast field of exploration and a great source of inspiration for them.
This series of 84 photographs, reproduced in full in the book, recounts a multitude of domestic, intimate, societal and poetic stories in which the border between fiction and reality is blurred.
Sometimes young women or young men, loving couples or transient roommates, bourgeois or vagabonds; the two young women play fictional characters, anonymous people with ordinary lives that echo the collective imagination, united by the very special atmosphere of the immense city of Calgary.